Today I’m speaking downstairs at our weekly Loaves and Fishes gathering, I’m finishing up the sermon for this Sunday, re-reading the passage in Mark I’m teaching in our Bible class, writing questions for the small groups discussions, and visiting a dear church member who was moved into hospice care last night. While you’re slaving away at the office or the construction site or the airport or the school, I’m at the church building doing God’s work. Right?
WRONG!
We are all doing God’s work, together, every day, seven days a week.
Sometimes we speak in ways that make what I do as a preacher “full-time Christian work” and what you do as a member of the Body of Christ “part-time Christian work” or “weekend Christian work.” You must know that you are a full-time Christian banker or plumber or homemaker. You are a full-time Christian truck driver or repair man, administrator or salesperson. When we are at our work, we are at the same time at God’s work. Just like our Lord Jesus.
You realize that most of what Jesus did he did in a secular workplace: in a farmer’s field, in a fishing boat, at a wedding feast, in a cemetery, at a public well, on a country hillside, in a court room, at dinner with friends and family, while walking along a road, in the marketplace. Sometimes in the Gospels Jesus shows up in a synagogue or the temple. But he mostly spends his time in the workplace.
The Fourth Gospel identifies Jesus as a “worker” 27-times. It quotes our Lord as saying, “My Father is still working, and I also am working.”
Your work does not take you away from God, it continues the work of God. Our God is always in his workplace, your workplace, working. And once we recognize that, we can more easily see ourselves — all of us — working in our workplaces in the name and manner of Jesus to his eternal glory and praise.
Peace,
Allan
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