Is God In Your Job

Is God In Your Job?

9/5/04 GNLCC Exodus 31:1-11 2 Thessalonians 3:6-15

This is Labor Day weekend in which we celebrate the fact that we have work to do. How well do you do the work that you do? If those around you had to give you a number from 1 to 10 on the kind of worker you are, what number would they give you at home or on the job with one being terrible and 10 being outstanding? How many 10’s, 7’s, 5’s, 3’s. Do you know any 1’s.

I read of a guy by the name of Tom Jackson who was terrible worker, and always looking to file a lawsuit against previous employers who fired him. Tom’s potential employer contacted his last employer for a reference. Now his former job knew they had to be careful with what they said to avoid a lawsuit. So they wrote their reference in a brief letter it said.

Dear Sir/Madam.

Tom Jackson worked for us for 13 months. We are certain that if Mr. Jackson works for you as long as he worked for us, you will think of Mr. Jackson then in the same way that we think about him now. Have a nice day.

Let me ask you the question, “is God in your job.” Now some of you are probably thinking, Pastor Rick “if you knew where I work you’d know that God is nowhere near my job. The people I work with are terrible.” If, you’re thinking that, you missed the question. I did not ask if God showed up at your job, but rather if God was in your job. You see, if you’re a believer, God ought to be showing up every time you show up.

When many of us hear the word job, we think of work, and when we think of work, we think of God, but not in the positive sense, instead many of us say either inside or outside, “oh my God I have to go to work, or I have to do the yard, or I have to do the dishes.”

We often want to avoid work like the plague. Some of us are planning our future so that we will not have to work again. We associate the word work with sin. We may think, if sin had not entered the world we would not have to work.

How many of you know that work was around long before sin came into being. There are hundreds of thousands of words in the Bible in thousands of verses in Scripture. I looked at 10 Bible translations, and in 9 of them, the word work was mentioned by the fifth word and it was the sixth word in the other translation. Most said something like, in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.

Anybody ever created a cake, a song, a poem, a book, a beautiful lawn? How many of you know that all involves work. Work has to be holy and it has to be good because that’s the first thing we find God doing in the bible. Before we find out that God loves, we find out that God works.

By reading the first chapter in the first book of the Bible, we find that God is an astronomer, God is a scientist, God is a navigator, God is a farmer, God is a geneticist, God is a supervisor, God is a construction worker, God is an architect, God is a designer, God is a painter, God is an artist, God is a watchmaker, and God is a preacher.

God is a swimmer, God is a dictionary writer, God is an astronaut, God is a judge, God is a physicist, God is a teacher, God is a priest, God is an organizer, God is a map drawer, God is an electric worker and a whole lot more. All of this stuff has to be holy or else God would not be involved with it. All of this stuff involves work.

After we find God having created the world, we find God creating the human race. Let’s read Genesis verse 1:26 together. Genesis 1:26-27

Then God said, "Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move along the ground." [27] So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.

Now God is in the process of working when God makes this statement. When God says let us make man in our image, part of the context has to do with working. To be in the image of God has something to do with work, because the first thing God assigns in this verse for human kind is a supervisory job.