I Owe, I Owe, It's Off To Work I Go

how can you eat an egg without cracking the shell?"

"Have someone else crack it for you."

Ex 20:9 Six days you shall labor and do all your work, 10 but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the LORD your God. On it you shall not do any work

1 Cor 4:12 We work hard with our own hands.

2 thes 3:10 For even when we were with you, we gave you this rule: “If a man will not work, he shall not eat.”

John 6.27 Do not work for food that spoils, but for food that endures to eternal life

Mat 6:24 “No one can serve two masters. Either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and Money.

work and religion don’t seem to mix

• from my side: people ask, “but what do you do?”

• from other side: ministers only seem to praise people who leave their jobs and go into the ministry. This leaves one thinking that work doesn’t matter to God.

• You can’t serve God and Money

• Implying that at work one can’t serve God and in church one can’t serve mammon (two are mutually exclusive)

1. signs that church and workplace are separated

a. workers are bored

i. their purpose for working is a paycheck

b. moral decline in workplace

i. Gallup Organisation researched calling in sick when not sick; cheating on income tax; stealing company supplies. Found no difference between church goers and non church goers

ii. “These findings will come as a shock to religious leaders and underscore the need of religious leaders to channel the new religious interest not only into religious involvement but into deep spiritual commitment”

iii. They further go on to suggest that the culture is now setting the standards for Christians at work.

iv. Christians have a moral schizophrenia:- at church they give their all to God, and then at work they do what everyone else does.

c. Work has become a religion

i. Self worth comes from your job

1. paycheck shows how much you are worth

ii. Worship self

1. A budget is a theological document. It indicates who or what we worship

iii. Everything else takes second place to one’s career.

1. success in life means success at work (alcoholic; divorced 3 times; children on drugs, but if successful in business, he is seen as a successful person.

2. Ecc 4:4 And I saw that all labor and all achievement spring from man’s envy of his neighbor. This too is meaningless, a chasing after the wind.

d. Christianity is treated like a weekend hobby

i. Religion has become privately engaging but socially irrelevant

2. A Christian’s options:

a. To travel back and forth between work and church

i. Deal with pastor – he preaches about sin and evils of society but doesn’t apply the Word to the workplace; and you give him some of your money to support him.

ii. Can do what you want at work and still feel OK at work.

b. To Say that your work doesn’t count as much as what you do at church

i. BUT this devalues your self: if 60% of your time doesn’t matter to God then you don’t matter to God

c. To say that Christianity has no value

i. This is what happens over time.

d. To bring the two worlds together

Benefits:

i. A sense of dignity from knowing that God cares about your work

ii. A sense of purpose

iii. Motivation to be a Christian at work (ethics)

iv. A new appreciation of Christianity

v. Hope – you’re not alone in your job.

The depths of our spirituality does not depend upon changing the things we do, but in doing for God what we ordinarily do for ourselves.

Brother Lawrence