God’s Vision for Work
Transcript
Well thank you guys for having me tonight. I'm encouraged that each of you guys are here on a Friday night and spending your time listening to some dude talk about work and the Bible. And I am allergic to mangoes; I wasn't always allergic to mangoes. It's a bummer to be allergic to mangoes. It really is. I'm also now allergic to apples, so it's apples and mangoes. Apples used to be my favorite fruit. I was working in the produce department at Target, not in the store, but up tinkling the ivory keyboard. And we used to get samples all the time of different types of produce and, you know, you get the Honeycrisp or like the sweetango and all these different crazy varieties of apples. And so I was eating like massive quantities of apples and apparently that can cause you to develop allergies. There also was a guy on the team that was kind of like a produce sourcing expert and he told us one time that you eat the skin with, you know, whatever fruit you're eating. Just like, eat the whole skin, you know, like a kiwi, just like, eat it like an apple.
And so I started doing that, and I tried that with a mango. And I don't know, you guys have never done this because no one would ever do this — don't do that because the skin of a mango actually has a chemical in it that is the same as what is secreted by poison ivy. And so as I did that, that's how I got allergic to mangoes.
Well, I want to begin tonight by being transparent with you guys. I appreciate your words, Peter, and very thankful for you guys having me but I don't feel like an authority on work, personally, so I don't have it all figured out. And so I want to start by echoing the apostle Paul, what he says in Philippians 3. We've been preaching through Philippians, it's been super fruitful. What he says here, I feel this, it’s kind of like my mindset that I'm coming in with tonight.
He says there,
“Not that I have already obtained this or am already perfect…”
So you know what we talk about tonight is not something that I feel like I have in full, I have obtained this, I'm already perfect, so here you go…
“…but I do press on to make it my own…”
I press on to make it my own. I want God's vision for work as a redeemed human in this life…
“…because Christ Jesus has made me his own.” (Phil. 3:12)
And that “because” is very important. Because of Jesus, because he is real, because he has made us his very own, called us his brothers and sisters, called us his friends, invited us into this grand redemptive work that he's doing in the cosmos. He encourages us onward. He accepts us, therefore we can press on. But I don't consider that I've made this my own. Even with that, one thing I do, forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead. So not being enslaved or held back by the mistakes and sins of the past, but I press on towards the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus, the upward call of God in Christ Jesus. So that's an important line, the call of God.
Many of you have probably heard of vocation talked about as a calling and not necessarily as the world would say, like, “hey, you gotta find your true calling.” But what does the call of God, what does being called by God in your work, in your vocation, What does that mean?
So we're gonna go on this journey together and like Pastor Jonathan reminded us a couple of weeks ago in his sermon on this passage: we’re not there yet but we keep pressing on because we were made for this. We're not there yet but we keep pressing on because we were made for this.
So tonight I've got three main topics for us.
1) We're going to start out first looking at like the origins of work: So how God created and intended work to be, all the way back at the beginning of the Bible.
2) Then we'll zoom in, second, on what it looks like a little bit more specifically for us. God's calling, to each of us individually, specifically as individuals.
3) And then we'll finish by fleshing out, hopefully practically, how do we glorify God in our daily work.
So before I really dive in, it'll be helpful to give you guys a little bit of context on what I do and my work history so you understand where I'm coming from. So my day job for the last 15 or so years has been in the secular world, it has been in kind of like the retail business. My dad was in sales, he was in sales for like 30 years. I never thought I would do, necessarily, what my dad did but I started taking business classes in college, and I loved them. I ended up majoring in Marketing at the U of M. And I interned at Target, the corporate office, before my senior year, and ended up starting there full-time after I graduated. In my first role there at Target I was like slinging purchase orders and allocating inventory across all the stores for sunscreen and body lotion. Dream job.
And they move you around at Target and so I eventually hit like toilet paper, which was even better. Then, produce, like I mentioned, grocery. And then I had some friends that had left Target and went to this like startup company out in California and I joined there. This was probably eight years ago now. And then I was in sales. So then I was doing what my dad did and I was in sales selling to Target and Walmart and Amazon. I was there for a couple years, that was a wild ride. I could tell you guys some stories of that, but the Lord led me to meet my current boss, who, is a believer, he went to Bethel. He is a small business owner and he owns like a sales rep agency that helps companies that are trying to sell to Target or Amazon. And so that's what I've been doing the last five years and that's what I'm doing today.
So in addition to Scripture, tonight, I’m going to be drawing from others because I'm not like the sage on this, but I've been very helped by a few sages, older guides on this work journey.
And so I'm going to be pulling from three main resources tonight.
First, Every Good Endeavor by Tim Keller. Raise your hand if you've read that book. Okay, nice, three. So if everybody would have read it, you would have been pretty bored so that's good. It's an amazing book. I would highly, highly recommend it.
Second, The Call by Os Guinness. Anybody read this one? Nice, I didn't think so. This is kind of like, an under the radar book. Os Guinness is actually the great great great grandson of Arthur Guinness, who is the Dublin brewer like as in Guinness beer. And Os is like, an English author and theologian. And that book is about calling specifically. It's super good.
And then, finally, Don't Waste Your Life, one of my favorite John Piper books. And specifically right in the middle of the book he has a chapter called “Making Much of Christ from 9 to 5”. And it's just gold.
So we'll reference those as we as we move through tonight. But first, we're gonna go to the Bible.
The Origins of Work
So we're going to start tonight going back to the beginning. And this is because we see work come into the picture very, very early. Like it's literally in page one of the Bible. In Genesis 2, it says,
“Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them. And on the seventh day God finished his work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all his work that he had done. So God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it God rested from all his work that he had done in creation.”
So this is a big deal — the very creation of the universe — how everything started by God himself is described as his work. God initiates the story of the world through his word, in his work.
Tim Keller says it like this,
“In the beginning then God worked. So work was not a necessary evil that came into the picture later, or something just us as human beings were created to do, but that was beneath God himself. No, God worked for the sheer joy of it. Work couldn't have a more exalted inauguration.”
So while we have our share of issues with work now, it is really important to remember this grand storyline of Scripture and where it all begins.
God doesn't just create the world and then stop working. There's three main categories of God's work that we see in the first few chapters of Genesis.
1) He creates.
2) He cares for his creation.
3) He commissions us as humans to join in and continue his work.
So we'll look at each of those.
We talked about how Scripture shows us that creation is God's work, but moving on in chapter 2 we see that,
“…then the Lord God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature. And the Lord God planted a garden in Eden, in the east, and there he put the man whom he had formed.”
So God continues his work by caring for his creation. So he creates Adam but then after forming him he breathes into his lungs the breath of life so that he could be alive and keep living. And then he plants him a garden. And just a few verses later, we see God provide a wife for Adam, a helper, a great helper. But to help him do what?
And that brings us to the third form of God's work that we see early on here, which is where he commissions us as humans to carry on his work. In Genesis 2:15, we see that the Lord God took the man and put him in the garden to work it and keep it. This was his commission.
So in the very beginning, God calls Adam to work and to keep the garden. He was to enter into that work that God had began in creating, cultivating, and keeping but God makes the commission even broader. He gives what's called the cultural mandate to Adam and Eve together in Genesis 1:28,
“And God said to them, ‘be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the heavens, and over every living thing that moves on the earth.’”
So here God calls humanity to do two things: fill the earth and subdue it. And filling the earth is not simply about having lots of babies and multiplying because he says separately “be fruitful and multiply”. God gives a different charge to humanity than he does to animals. For animals, in Genesis, the Lord just says, you know, “let them multiply” and that's it. But to humanity, he says, “fill the earth and subdue it.”
Fill the earth. That is, fill the earth with a purpose, with intention — not just multiplying randomly, but filling the earth with a purpose. This is about developing and building a society. It's not simply just multiplication, but it's about culture. It's about building a society.
But then, also, God calls us to “subdue the earth.” And this is interesting because this is before the fall. This is before sin, before evil, before decay. You have to subdue the earth. And another way to think about this would be, to rule the earth, as God's image bearers. And Keller says like this, he says,
“God owns the world, but he has put it under our care to cultivate it. And the word subdue indicates that even in its original, unfilled form, God made the world to need work.”
So even as God creates the world, there's no sin, there's no evil, there's untapped potential in the earth. There's untapped potential in the world that requires work. God puts Adam in the garden to work it and keep it before sin. So work is not something that comes in after the fall that we just, you know, by the sweat of your brow will you eat bread. And so obviously we have problems now but it's really important to know that in the beginning this is part of our identity as humans. Part of how God made us is to work.
I want to read an extended quote from Keller here because I think it's super helpful in regards to what this commissioning towards cultivation actually looks like on the ground. He says,
“If we are to be God's image bearers with regard to creation, then we will carry on his pattern of work. His world is not hostile, so that it needs to be beaten down like an enemy, rather, its potential is undeveloped so that it needs to be cultivated like a garden. So we're to be gardeners who take an active stance towards their charge. They don't leave the land as it is. They dig up the ground and rearrange it with a goal in mind to rearrange the raw material of the garden so that it produces food, flowers and beauty. And that's the pattern for all work. It's creative and assertive. It's rearranging the raw material of God's creation in such a way that it helps the world in general, and people in particular, to thrive and flourish. And this pattern is found in all kinds of work. Whenever we bring order out of chaos, whenever we draw out creative potential, whenever we elaborate and unfold creation beyond where it was when we found it, we are following God's pattern of creative cultural development.”
I love that. So building upon that, I want you just to think for a minute about your own work: Can you identify any of the seeds of God's cultural mandate in forming, filling, subduing in what you do every day in your tasks and objectives? How are you joining in God's pattern for work?
Let me give you an example. For the last five years, as I mentioned, my primary work has been helping companies sell stuff on Amazon. And so there's kind of like two main ways I can think about this question of: how am I joining in God's pattern for work?
One, we have the raw materials of the products and the brands that we work with. So that might be a mop or an above ground pool or a ceramic box cutter. And so we have the product itself and we have the raw material of what that is and we might have some pictures of it or some words that describe it. And our job is to take that raw material, rearrange it, emphasize it, and upload it to Amazon so that when you guys are shopping on Amazon and are looking for something and you need something, you need to replace something, or you have a particular need, you're throwing a party or whatever you're doing, that you can actually find the right thing and that when you get on the page it's described honestly and accurately and you're not bamboozled into buying something that is total junk. So that's part of what we're doing, so that helping people find what they need and understand what they're buying and not get hosed in what they're buying.
But there's also the question of how that work actually gets done. And that's kind of the other angle and probably the more important angle in my work of how I'm following God's pattern — which is the people. A big part of my job is helping the 12 people that work at our company to be arranged and coached and supported and to be in the best possible role that fits their God given skills and abilities and talents so that they can be thriving as they do the work.
So those are the couple of ways that I think about how I'm joining in God's pattern for work.
So we've tasted some of that broad vision in creation of God's plan for work for humanity before the fall, but we can also zoom in further, elsewhere in Scripture, to look at more specifically, God's calling to us as individuals. So we'll go to the New Testament now.
1 Corinthians 7:17, Paul says,
“Only let each person lead the life that the Lord has assigned to him, and to which God has called him. This is my rule in all the churches. So, brothers, in whatever condition each was called, let him there remain with God.”
In this chapter in Corinthians, Paul is encouraging the believers in Corinth that they don't have to leave whatever situation that they were in before they became believers in order to glorify God. So they don't have to, you know, leave the marriage they were in or their vocation or their social status. And he gives different examples. And in this text, you see elsewhere, you know, Paul’s not just referring to like a ministry job. So he's not just saying, if you have a ministry job it’s a calling from the Lord. But he's talking about just common social or economic tasks. And he's naming them God’s calling and assignments. That's a very profound thing. Obviously the most important calling that we receive from God is God calling us out of darkness and into light as we respond to the gospel. But then we do see that even in our seemingly ordinary vocations, Paul can say, “let each person lead the life that the Lord has assigned to him, to which God has called him.” That that the Lord has assigned to you your vocation. He has called you to it.
He says let each person. So this is very specific, you know, let each person, this is an individual, unique story that God has crafted for each of us. And it reminds me of Ephesians 2:10, where Paul says,
“We are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.”
So God is the ultimate author and worker, but he creates us anew in Jesus to continue in these good works. And my favorite part, you know, it says he prepared specific ones for each of us beforehand, that we should walk in them.
So the Lord assigns to us a specific calling, and he prepares specific works for each of us beforehand that we should walk in them.
So, I mean, that's a pretty profound thing to remember on a Monday morning or a Thursday afternoon: That you're not just randomly in, you know, the job that you have or the vocation that you're in. Even if that's not what you're going to do forever, it doesn't mean the path never changes. But it does mean that for that moment, for this time, God has placed you there. God has assigned you there. God has called you there. And that changes how we approach the day. Again, it doesn't mean that we never change jobs or careers. I mean, you see in the Bible, Jesus going to down to the water and calling fishermen to leave. Leave the nets and come follow me. Do something different, do something else. So it's not that we can't ever do anything else, but that we should view our vocations as more than simply something that I picked. Or that it’s just my decision… this is why I'm here.
Os Guinness, in his book, The Call, talks about how different this view of biblical calling is than the typical ways that modern people kind of define their identity or their purpose in their work. He gives four primary categories that modern people use to try to define their personal identity in their work. Each of them start with a ‘C’…
Constrained to be
First is what Guinness calls “constrained to be”. This is where we attempt to explain who we are in generalities. So it's like personality profile or generational stereotype or regional caricature. We put ourselves or we put other people in a box. Like, “oh, I'm an ENTP, I'm a millennial, I'm a midwesterner, my dad was in sales.” As if your vocation is kind of determined and limited by the expectations placed upon you. So you're “constrained to be.”
Courage to be
Second, you have this opposite trend, and this is much more popular now. This is definitely gaining steam and this could be termed “courage to be.” And in this view you can be whatever you want. You can be anything. And you buck against any stereotype, any definition of any kind. A proponent of this philosophy, Nietzsche, would say “we start from the abyss of a world without meaning, and by sheer willpower, create our own meaning out of nothing.” Wow. So you guys have probably seen the folly of this perspective if you actually try to play it out completely. Like, we know this….I mean, you can't literally be anything that you want…As much as I might want to play center in the NBA, I'm just not going to be able to do that. I'm not tall enough. I'm not strong enough. I'm not fast enough. I don't got the goods. I can't play center in the NBA, as much as I might want to be. You know, I don't have the dexterity to be a world class painter. As much as Chewbacca might want to be a news anchor, ain’t nobody gonna understand him, you know? So it's like you can't literally be anything that you want to be.
Constituted to be
The third view is that our purpose is “constituted to be.” And this is kind of like it's determined in advance. Pablo Picasso said that “everyone's nature is determined in advance.” And this view values really highly the ideas of fate and destiny, like it was your destiny to to meet this person or to work here. This this was fate. It's very common in New Age thinking. In this view, whatever will be will be and our agency is basically removed.
Called To Be
So after wandering through the sadness of these three potential secular definitions of what our purpose is in our work, we arrive at the oasis of being “called to be” which is different than the other three.
I think we can see this picture of calling really well in Isaiah 43, it says there,
“But now thus says the Lord, he who created you [I'm hearing constituted], O Jacob, he who formed you [hearing constrained or shaped], O Israel: ‘fear not [have courage], for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name, you are mine.’”
I have called you by name, you are mine. Regarding the concept of biblical calling, Keller says that,
“We can recover the idea that work is a vocation or a calling. It's a contribution to the good of all and not merely a means of one's own advancement to one's self-fulfillment or power.”
So it's not about me. It's about the good of all. It's about others.
So remember that something can be a vocation or a calling only if some other party calls you to do it and you do it for their sake rather than for your own. So our daily work can be a calling only if it is reconciled as God's assignment to serve others.
Our daily work can be a calling only if it is reconciled as God's assignment to serve others.
And that's exactly how the Bible teaches us to view work. So that gives us another question to ponder: What changes could you expect to see in your daily work if you began to consider it more and more as God's assignment to serve others?
I'll give you guys another example. About two years into my career, I found myself as the inventory planning analyst for toilet paper at Target. And it was actually one of the more stressful jobs that I've ever had because someone was always mad at me. Either on one hand, I hadn't bought enough of the Charmin and the Cottonelle and so then like the shelves would be empty. And if you were out of one item… one item was like 12 feet, so it looked like you weren't even in business and so the stores would be really mad at me. And apparently, you know, I'm assuming there were poopy butts all over the place. And so on one hand, that was really bad, but on the other hand, sometimes I would order a little bit too much. Then I would have the distribution centers calling me and yelling at me because then there'd be literally pallets stacked to the ceilings as far as you could see. Like, you know, like Raiders of the Lost Ark when he's going into the warehouse and it's just like woah, that's what the warehouse looked like and it was just all toilet paper.
And my job was measured very precisely, everything was metrics. All the stores had to be in stock 99% of the time and that was called being green. All the numbers were color coded. And so we had to be 99% in stock, but then you also you had like a purchasing budget. So you couldn't spend more money than, you know, the company had allocated to you. And so it was like this razor thin margin of error. And I remember in those days it was very easy for me to forget what my true calling actually was, what I was supposed to be doing, how I was supposed to be viewing it.
My boss would essentially be telling me you're calling is to hit the metrics and forget the rest. So I was stressed out a lot. But on the days that I was able to reframe and reorient and remember that God was assigning me to this role to love and serve others. To like see my coworkers, and ask them how they were doing and to care about them. And ultimately, you know, my job was just to make sure that stores had some toilet paper for people to buy. And that's a good thing. You know, keeping butts clean is good.
And so that was God's assignment to me in those days. And when I had that frame of mind and heart, I could work from a place of peace and joy. And not surprisingly, I was a much better worker when I was operating from that frame of mind than being frazzled or just chasing success or something like that. So anyway, that's how I would answer that question.
So we've talked about the biblical origins of work. We've talked about God's calling to us in our individual specific work. And I want to close tonight by asking a little bit more practically: In what ways, on the ground, in our daily work, can we glorify God in our work? So how do we actually glorify God in our work in our daily lives?
Making Much of Jesus in Daily Work
And for help here, I want to draw out four very helpful truths that John Piper identifies from Scripture in his book Don't Waste Your Life. And this is from chapter 8 in that book…
1) “We can make much of Jesus in our work through the fellowship that we enjoy with him throughout the day in all our work.”
So let me also state this negatively: I fail to make much of Jesus in my work when I rely simply on my own strength and understanding, and I forget his promises to me.
So back in 1 Corinthians 7:24, Paul encouraged us,
“…in whatever condition each was called, let him there remain with God.”
So in your calling, in your assignment, remain there with God. Sometimes it's hard to get in this mindset. Sometimes like you’ll do your Bible study in the morning and then go to work, and you kind of gotta go there by yourself and then maybe you can think about the Lord when you come home or something like that. But we can go to work with God. We can be in fellowship with God as we're working throughout the day, in dependance on him. Like Jesus is real and he is with us.
Piper says,
“we enjoy God being there for us as we listen to his voice, talk to him, cast our burdens on him, and experience his guidance and care.”
So a great way to apply this is to bring specific promises from Scripture with you to work. Whether written down on a note card or in your notes app on your phone or even better, memorized and digesting in your mind and in your heart so that you can refer to God's Word to you throughout the day as you're working. And it depends on what you need. You know, maybe you need encouragement to kind of push through a tough time at work.
So maybe you need to hear God say to you,
“Fear not, I am with you, be not dismayed, I am your God. I will strengthen you. I will help you. I will uphold you with my righteous right hand.” (Isaiah 41).
Or maybe you need the reminder that the challenges of the afternoon are not too much for him to manage,
“Behold, I am the Lord, the God of all flesh. Is anything too hard for me?”(Jeremiah 32).
Maybe you need guidance. You don't know what to do. You don't know which decision to make,
“I will instruct you and teach you in the way you should go. I will counsel you with my eye upon you.” (Psalm 32).
So God delights in being trusted in and valued and we can't waste a workday that we approach in that way. So that's number one.
2) “We can make much of Jesus in our work when it confirms and enhances the portrait of Jesus’s glory that people hear in the spoken gospel.”
So said negatively: I fail to make much of Jesus in my work when it detracts from or confuses the portrait of Jesus’s glory in the gospel. Does that make sense?
In Titus 2, Paul is talking about the way that bondservants do their work and he calls them Titus 2:9, to be
“…well pleasing, not argumentative, not pilfering, but showing all good faith so that in everything they may adorn the doctrine of God our Savior.”
So work in this way. Approach work in this way because in so doing that you are adorning the doctrine of God our Savior or the gospel. You're adorning the gospel. So it's a concept worth thinking about: That the way that we do our work can actually adorn the gospel. It's not that the way that we do our work is going to save anyone. So no one's going to be saved by us just doing good work, but when coupled with others knowing that we are Christians and knowing what we believe, doing excellent work in the right way, like Paul says, showing good faith, seeking to serve and love others, not being argumentative, not stealing, that's kind of an obvious one, working hard…it can actually adorn the gospel. So it can remove stumbling blocks and barriers for people to believe.
I mean think about it, like if people know that we're Christians and we're just like super lazy bad workers, that is not a good adornment for the gospel. But on the other hand, if there's an attractiveness and a joy and a peace and an excellence to which we're working, that can open doors and that can adorn the gospel, that can honor God even in the eyes of our coworkers or of others.
3) “We can make much of Jesus in our work by earning money with a desire to use our money generously to make others joyful in Jesus.”
Said negatively: I fail to make much of Christ in my work when I seek to earn money just to make myself more comfortable or to make myself feel more important.
In Ephesians 4:28, Paul says,
“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.”
So let him labor, do honest work with your hands so that you have something to share with someone in need.
So Piper says that there's three options:
1) You can steal to have — you can be a thief.
2) You can work to have — just to be selfish.
3) You can work to have — to give.
And when that third option comes from joy in who God is, in his goodness, and it bubbles over in generosity — that makes Jesus look great in the world. That's a way that we can glorify him in our work.
4) “We make much of Jesus in our work by treating the web of relationships that it creates as a gift of God to be loved by sharing the gospel and by practical needs of help.”
Or negatively: I fail to make much of Jesus in my work when I treat the web of relationships that it creates as a distraction or as just tools to be used, drama to be avoided.
1 Peter 2, Paul says,
“You are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness and into his marvelous light.”
So we know it's overly reductionistic to say that the only way that we can glorify God in our work is when we share the gospel with people. That's overly reductionistic. We've seen in Scripture that there's a much broader view of that but we can't make the opposite error and say, “Well, I don't have to at all. I'm not going to at all. I'm just going to work hard and work well and hopefully people will just figure it out.” No. We have to speak it when we have the opportunity. And we have an amazing opportunity to whether we're in a ministry job or a secular job — our work is putting us into contact with people in the world that we wouldn't otherwise meet. And the Lord gives us opportunities to speak the gospel, to say what we believe, to share your testimony. And as 1 Peter says, this is this part of our core identity now as God's people. You know, we're people for his own possession that we may proclaim the excellencies of him who called us out of darkness and into light.
And so that brings us to another question: Who is close to you through your work but far from God that you could be praying for, investing in, and inviting into your life?
Try to think of of one person and if you haven't been praying for them or investing in them or inviting them into your life, try to start.
Now, I've failed in this many times. I've had opportunities and have not spoken up. But, let me close with another story. When I was working at Target, several years ago, there was a new guy on our team that I was put in charge of training. And he was not doing a very good job. He was rubbing people the wrong way on the team. Nobody really liked him. He was he was struggling. And so his manager and I had to give him like really hard feedback. So we had to pull him into a conference room and basically say like, “hey, like, I don't know if this is going to work out, these are the things that you're not doing well and, you know, you got to turn it around.” And he started crying, and like, took it super hard. And after the meeting, I pulled him into a conference room and I was like, you know, tell me about how you're feeling. Like why did that hit you so hard?
And he end up sharing that one of his best friends from high school had just committed suicide. And he was just like super confused and was having a really hard time with it and was thinking about death for the first time and his own death. And he was just spiraling. And so I had an opportunity in that moment to say something or say nothing. And, thankfully, the Lord opened my mouth and I started talking to him about Jesus. And I started talking to him about how Jesus had changed my life and how I had been at a funeral for one of my high school friends, not not as a believer at the time, and had started thinking about the fact that I was going to die and that I was not prepared for that. And, the Lord was stirring in my heart to start reading the Bible which I had not done previous to that. And he opened my eyes to who Jesus was and I was telling him about this in this conference room at Target headquarters, when we were probably supposed to be working but the opportunity had presented itself. I have shared the gospel with people at work several times and normally when I share my testimony, I share the gospel, people are like “oh, that's nice.”
But in this conference room, with my co-worker, sitting across from him, he looked up at me and he said, “that sounds really good. Can we talk more about that?” And I was like, “Yes, we can, yes we can!” And we ended up going through John together and doing Bible study for a long time. He started coming to church with me and incidentally he totally turned it around at work too. His attitude was totally different, he started doing a great job. People loved having him on the team and he ended up being very successful there. And we still keep in touch and, you know, it doesn't always happen like that and it hasn't always happened like that for me but but God is at work in our work, in us, through us.
We Press On
And so let's just remember where we began tonight:
Because Christ Jesus has made us his own, because he has accepted us, in that acceptance we can press on for the upward call of God in our lives.
We can join in God's pattern for work and remember that God worked for the sheer joy of it in creation, and he's still working.
We can respond to God's calling in our vocations embracing his assignment to love and serve others.
We can make much of Jesus in our work in several practical ways.
So we're not there yet, but we keep pressing on because we were made for this. Amen. Let me pray…
God, I thank you for these brothers and sisters here tonight. I thank you for the skills and abilities and opportunities and relationships that you have given each of them. We do thank you for the good gift of work, for your pattern in creation, and we praise you that we truly are your workmanship, that you are working on us and in us and through us in our vocations.
And I pray, Father, that you would make us worthy of this calling, that you would encourage us, that you would fulfill every resolve for good and every work of faith by your power so that the name of Jesus would be glorified. And we humbly ask that despite our failings and stumbling, that you would do much good in these Twin Cities and beyond through the vocations of those in this room tonight. We need you, Jesus. We love you. And we ask this in the powerful name of Jesus, Amen.
