I haven't always worn a suit to work. A couple of days after I married
Lavonne I got my first job in working my way through college. It was at
the John Morrell Meat Packing Plant In Sioux Falls, South Dakota. After
a summer of that we went off to Bethel and I got a number of jobs. I
worked in a Battery Factory, the St. Paul Foundry, Curtis 1000 Printing
Company, and in between these major jobs I did a number of custodial
jobs. In every case they were dirty jobs and I spent a good portion of my
educational years with a variety of messiness. I pulled the toenails off
from pigs for a while. I pulled thousands of batteries apart and had holes
in my clothes all the time because of the acid that would splash on me. I
worked so close to a foundry blast furnace where everybody was a mass of
soot for 8 to 10 hours a day. The dirt clung to you so that you looked more
black than white. I had my hands in printers ink for 4 years and seldom to
never did I have it all clean from under my nails.
I had a lot of dirty jobs in those years, but I learned that the work
place is a place where Christians can grow, and where their witness can
make a difference. Only once did I have the privilege of leading a fellow
worker to Christ on the job, but I had many opportunities to share my
faith. I discovered that Christian convictions are a whole lot easier to have
on Sunday in the church than on Monday at work. For 4 years I worked
with a boss who was an atheist. He rejected the Bible and the Christian
perspective on life. For 5 days a week I worked with this man. He did me
more good than many of my professors and pastors because he forced me
to defend my convictions, and to make them relevant in the real world of
the work place.
My struggle to bridge the gap between Sunday and Monday changed
my whole perspective on life and made me a skeptical Christian. I mean
this in a good sense. I became skeptical of easy and pat answers that
Christians spout off that do not fit the reality of people's everyday lives.
Working with people of all different backgrounds and convictions made
me realize that we often let our narrow experience of life shape our
theology and limit God to our puny perspective. One of the best things the
work place did for me was to make the world a bigger place. If forced me
to broaden my perspective. If Christianity is to be relevant it must enable
the Christian to learn how to work with all kinds of people, and do it in
such a way that they are accepted as part of the team. In other words, you
have to be accepted by your fellow workers as a person before they will
have any interest in accepting your witness for Christ.
Your work and your witness are not two separate things. They are
one because your work is the foundation to your witness. Poor work, or
poor working relationships will so undermine your witness that it will be
basically workless in its impact. Paul says in Col. 3:17, "And whatever
you do, whether in word or deed, do all in the name of the Lord Jesus,
giving thanks to God the Father through Him." Paul says the Christian
life consists in what you say and what you do. Prov. 12:14 is saying the
same thing: "From the fruit of his lips a man is filled with good things as
surely as the work of his hands rewards him." Words and work are the
two means whereby we experience the good life. The Old Testament agree
that the two key elements for success in bridging the gap between our
worship and our workplace will be our words and our work, or what we
say and what we do.
These are the two tracks on which the train of Christian living make
progress into the secular world. If you do and say the right and wise
things you will be able to transfer the truth of Sunday into the workplace
on Monday. If any changes are going to take place, and if you are going to
let Christ transform your daily work, you need to focus on these two
things. Let's first consider-
I. OUR WORK.
Solomon says the work of our hands is what rewards us. Everything
about life that we enjoy and praise God for comes to us by means of work.
Our homes, possessions, churches, schools, cities, stores and roads all come
by work. Even the treasures of nature are ours because God worked for 6
days in creating it all, and then gave man the intelligence to know how to
use nature, and by work get out of it all that He built into it. Work is of
the very essence of life. It is not called labor for nothing that leads to the
birth of a child. We only have life and the gift of children by means of
work.
Reality as we know it began with God working, and the first thing
God did with Adam is give him a job. We think of paradise as a vacation,
but for Adam is was a vocation. Gen. 2:15 says, "The Lord God took the
man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it."
There was no unemployment in this perfect world. God made man to
work. The fall made work harder and less productive, but work is not the
curse. Work was part of the blessing of man in his perfection, and it will
be a part of his eternal relation to God. Man is made in the image of God
with the capacity to think and reason, and so he can figure out how energy
can be used in such a way as to take raw material and create what is new
and beneficial.
Jesus came into this world to be worker with wood. He created things
by work, and He left us an example that dignifies manual labor. William
Torrent wrote, "My Master was a worker, With daily work to do, And he
that would be like Him, Must be a worker too." It is Christ-like to work
and to create. Jesus chose men to be His disciples who were part of the
labor force of His day. They all had jobs they had to leave. Jesus did not
go to those who were idle and unemployed to choose His disciples. He
called those from their occupation to follow Him. Jesus wanted workers,
for His task of reaching this world was going to take work. In John 5:17
Jesus said, "My Father is always at His work to this very day, and I, too,
am working." What the world needs is Christian workers who can see
how their work fits into the plan of God to use work to reach the world.
The workplace is one of the key areas of life for Christians to build
relationships with the world. On Sunday we build relationships with
Christians and develop the family of God ties, but Monday through Friday
we have opportunity to build relationships with the world. The workplace
is our experience of the incarnation. Jesus was in heavenly glory, but He
came to be a man and worker in the midst of worldly people. So we must
leave the shelter of the Christian environment and descend into the world
of the workplace where there is foul language dirty stories, and exposure
to all that is secular.
How can we make a difference? How can we be the salt and the light?
The first step is by our work. The Christian has to be a good worker to
have any chance to be a good witness. The Christian who is lazy and
shirks their fair share of the load will be considered a joke if they try to
witness for Christ. Your work itself has to be your first witness. If people
you work with do not respect you for the job you do, they will not have
respect for any belief you have. If your beliefs do not benefit them first by
giving them a helpful co-worker, you can forget making any positive
impression on them with your words. Your actions will speak so loud they
won't hear what you say.
When the Christian can see that the job they do is the key to a good
witness, then Christ will be able to transform their daily work, for they
will then be able to see that their work itself is a tool for witness. I found
that if I did a better than average job, even when I didn't like what I had
to do, it opened up doors of opportunity for me to witness. Doing a poor
job at anything is not a very effective witness for Christ. There are so
many jobs that have to be done that are not glamorous, fun or meaningful.
They are just jobs that have to be done and it is hard to link them in any
way with the glory of God. It seems almost demeaning to link God in any
way with such lowly tasks.
I think of the humorous event in the life of C. S. Lewis, which he
shared in a letter to his brother. He wrote, "I was going into town one day
and had got as far as the gate when I realized that I had odd shoes on, one
of them clean and the other dirty. There was no time to go back. As it was
impossible to clean the dirty one, I decided that the only way of making
myself look less ridiculous was to dirty the clean one." Imagine, here is
one of the world's most distinguished professors and world famous
Christian authors, and he is trying to get his clean shoe dirty so it would
match his other dirty one. I doubt if Lewis was thinking of the glory of
God as he labored on this trivial task. He was thinking only of his own
image and of the embarrassment of looking foolish. But this trivial event
calls attention to the fact that all of life's tasks do add or detract from the
glory of God by making us either acceptable to others, or rejected by
others."
Everything we do on the job, however trivial, makes us more or less
acceptable. It either helps us to build relationships, or tear them apart. If
our work meats with approval we have a better chance of having our
words of witness listened too. The point is, if we are not better workers
and more helpful to the team for being Christians, why should anyone be
impressed with being a Christian? If the atheist does a better job, and if
the humanist is more cooperative, and if the non-church person is a better
encourager of others, why is anybody going to be listening to a Christian
who is more interested in being critical and self-righteous than in being a
team player?
The same goes for a Christian in business. If it is not better to work
for you because you are a Christian, why should anyone be impressed by
the fact that you are a Christian? If non-Christian bosses and employers
treat people better why should anyone be eager to know what you tick?
Instead, they will be ticked at you, and probably feel that you use your
religious convictions to justify your sub-Christian behavior. The best basis
for a witness for Christ in the workplace is doing a job in such a way that
those who work with you will like you as a fellow worker, or as a boss.
Herbert Eaton was a millionaire who lost everything when his gold
mining operation went bankrupt. He was out of a job and in debt, but that
was where his work for God began. He became the manager of Forest
Lawn Cemetery. It sounds like a dead end job if there ever was one, but
Eaton was a Baptist layman who decided that cemeteries should not
glorify the devil. He was convicted that they should glorify Christ who
conquered the devil and death, and who rose victorious over the grave to
give eternal life. He started a dream that has radically changed the entire
funeral and cemetery industry in the English speaking world.
As president of the Men's Club in the Temple Baptist Church he
started a campaign to make Forest Lawn a memorial park that would
bring glory to Christ. It is a story of a long and hard struggle against
unbelievable odds, but he achieved his goal and made it one of the most
beautiful places on this earth. He packed the place with the world's best
art that glorifies the risen Lord. He did it by means of Christian principles
applied in the workplace. Forest Lawn was the first company to give paid
vacations to hourly wage employees. It was the first cemetery to ask for
and accept suggestions from all workers. It was among the first to offer all
kinds of fringe benefits. Keep in mind that we are back in the 1920's,
decades before these benefits were won by long hard battles for millions of
workers.
Herbert Eaton has witnessed to millions for Christ because he first
did an excellent job of being a Christian worker who made all who worked
with him consider it a privilege. We can't all be Eaton's, but we can all
apply Christian principles in the workplace, and thus be workers who
make working more pleasant for all those with whom we work. Our work
itself is our first an primary witness for Christ. Next we look at-
II. OUR WORDS.
As the hands produce work, so the mind produces words. Words are
also work, and not just for the writer and speaker, but for all of us. Words
represent the work of the inner man. They are the labor of our thinking,
feeling and caring. By means of words we do work that the hands can
never do. We build buildings with our hands, but it is by our words that
we build up people by edifying and encouraging them. It is by our hands
that we operate machines, but it is by words that we control relationships.
One of the key ways that Christ can transform your daily work will be
by you becoming aware of how what you say is a part of your daily work.
What you say after you do a good job can make all the difference in the
world as to your happiness with your job, and to your effectiveness as a
Christian witness. The Christian who does not have a different vocabulary
from the world is going to have a hard time bridging the gap between
worship and work. If you praise God with your tongue on Sunday, and
then curse man with that tongue on Monday, your Jekyll and Hyde
performance will please neither God nor man. Your words must develop a
consistency if there is to be any transfer of the sacred to the secular. If you
compartimentalize, and have a sacred vocabulary in church, but then a
secular vocabulary at work, these duel dictionaries of speech never
intermingle, and you will not likely be allowing Christ to influence your
daily work. It is by words that we often do our greatest work for God, or
it may be by the words that we never speak.
Moliere pictures the beggar on the street corner crying out for alms
for the love of God. The nobleman Don Juan, a bitter ungodly man, holds
out a gold coin over the arm of the beggar and says, "Blaspheme God and
I'll give it to you." The temptation to conform to the value system of
another for monetary gain is a universal temptation. But the beggar says,
"No my Lord, I shall not blaspheme." Those words and refusal of words
were a work of art as beautiful to God as a symphony or a Mona Lisa.
Jesus said that by our words we will be justified or condemned. Words
are works for which we shall receive or lose reward. Words are works
that will transform our work as a witness to men.
To make worship practical to Monday we need to listen to God on
Sunday and strive to see what we learn can be used on Monday. I think
Mother Teresa of Calcutta was saying something very practical when she
said, "The essential thing is not what we say, but what God says to us and
through us. All our words will be useless unless the come from within.
Words which do not give the light of Christ increase the darkness."
When we only communicate our words that reveal our personality and
our bias's, we draw or repel people from us. This is not all bad, for it is
part of life that we cannot escape, and it can even be very good. But when
we communicate the words of God and His will for man, then we help
them focus on Christ and not just our personality. People should be given
a chance to respond to Jesus base on who He is and His claims regardless
of who we are. That is why we need to learn to share with others the
words of Christ. We need to say things that can convey His convictions,
even if we have not yet made them our own. The only way we can do this
is to listen to the Word of God with the workplace in mind. We need to
work at breaking down the barriers between the secular and the sacred.
One of the hardest working groups of Christians in the world are the
Wycliff Bible Translators. They have to link the sacred and secular all day
long as they seek to learn what words in a language best say what the Bible
is trying to communicate. Scott MacGregor was working on a language
where he had to study boats to get the story of Christ accurately
communicated. Jesus preached from a boat, but the people He was trying
to reach did not have a simple word for boat. They had 12 different kinds
of boats, and he had to study all of them to select the one that most fit the
type of fishing boat Jesus would have used. This kind of thing is going on
all over the world. The search goes on for the right words to convey the
Word of God to people in the context in which they live.
If we could see ourselves in this same role, it could transform our daily
work. We are to bring our secular jobs into our worship with the prayer
that God would open our eyes to see how His Word can change our words
in a way that would convey what God wants communicated. When God
wanted to save this lost secular world He sent the Word. The Word
became flesh, and not only told us the will of God, but showed us by His
works. Words and works are the 2 channels God used to save man.
Richard Madden took all of the words of Christ that we have recorded
in the Gospels and he read them into a recorder at a normal speed. He
discovered that all Jesus spoke to the world took just 11 minutes. We
know Jesus spoke for many hundreds of hours to His disciples and to the
crowds, but all that is recorded for time is a mere eleven-minute speech. I
think it would take the average person much longer to read all that Jesus
said, but the point is, Jesus expected that less than an hour of His words
would change all of history. He was right, of course, and they have, and
He thereby demonstrated the power of words. A major part of His work
was to leave us His words, and a major part of the work of the church is to
convey these words to the world.
When the Christian had won the respect of his fellow workers by his
good work, then he can have a powerful impact on them by his words. It
also works the other way. If you talk down to others like a self-righteous
Pharisee, your words will destroy the witness of your good work. Your
words have to correspond with your work and be words of encouragement
and hope that entice the worldly mind to wonder what you have found in
Christ. If all you do is complain about life, the job, and man as a lousy
sinner, you will not have much of appeal to the non-Christian. They need
to see and hear in you one who knows just as much as they do about the
crumby side of life, but who can yet be an optimist with joy, hope and love
for life. They need to hear words from you that convey how being a
Christian is more than a Sunday affair. They need to see it is a
life-changing affair, and that knowing Jesus makes a difference in your
everyday secular life.
Peter Marshall in his famous Christianity Can Be Fun sermon said
something we need to hear and make clear to others by our words:
"God is a God of laughter as well as of prayer....a God of singing,
as well as of tears. God is at home in the play of His children.
He loves to hear us laugh. We do not honor God by our long
faces...our austerity. God wants us to be good-not
"goody-goody."
There is quite a distinction. We must try to make the distinction
between worship and work and play less sharp...If God is not in
your typewriter as well as your hymnbook, there is something
wrong with your religion. If your God does not enter your
kitchen there is something the matter with your kitchen.
If you can't take God into your recreation there is something
wrong with the way you play. If God, for you, does not smile,
there is something wrong with your idea of God. We all believe
in the God of the heroic. What we need most these days is the
God of the humdrum...the commonplace...the everyday."
If we will only be conscience of the presence of God in our daily life,
our daily work will be transformed, for we will be thinking of how we can
be channels of His love and truth in our work relationships. Prov. 12:25
says, "An anxious heart weighs a man down, but a kind word cheers him
up." Christ could transform your daily work if you would just consciously
speak a kind word to one or several of your fellow workers. You have it in
your power to add to life's gloom, or to light up the room with words that
encourage. Show me the Christian who will focus on excellence in his
work and encouragement in his words, and I'll show you a Christian who
has bridged the gap between reverence and worship and relevance in
work.
