Sensitive To The Spirit Series

George Burns said, "There will always be a battle between the

sexes because men and women want different things. Men want

women and women want men." This is, of course, what God

intended, but like all good things that are carried to excess this too

becomes an area of life where the sinful nature of man thrives.

Sexual immorality is the first fruit of the flesh that Paul refers to, just

as love is the first fruit of the Spirit.

This means that one of the first signs that you are not being led of

the Spirit, but are being led by your sinful nature, is the desire to be

sexually immoral. Since everyone is so tempted at some point in life,

this confirms Paul's point of the conflict between the flesh and the

spirit. Now this has a direct bearing on the work place. The one

thing I learned in my years of secular work is that sex and work go

together like love and worship. On Sunday we focus on agape love

and worship, and then on Monday we enter a world of work where

the focus is on sex. It is no wonder we have a hard time bridging this

gap and trying to relate the one to the other.

In the plants I worked in where a secretary came out of the office

into the plant, the men would whistle and then have crude

discussions about anatomy. You didn't learn anything about love,

but you could pick up some ideas about sex, because that is the theme

of the work place. If that was true 30 years ago, I cannot imagine

what it is now. Sexual harassment laws have no doubt curbed some

of the sexuality, but there is no way it can eliminate it. In the place

where I worked men sometimes had pinups by their machines, or in

their lockers, and the flirting that went on was a major factor in that

environment.

In my counseling over the years I have noted that most of the

Christians I am aware of who have had affairs have done so because

of their relationships in the work place. Many a Christian marriage

has been killed by the work place morality that exalts sex over love.

Surveys reveal that working wives have twice as many affairs as do

non-working wives. It is not entirely due to a immoral focus on sex.

There are natural factors that add to the danger of the work place.

Work and sex are linked by the fact that they both begin about the

same time in life. Young people are getting their first serious jobs at

the same time they are going through puberty, or when they are at

the peak of their sex drive.

I didn't have to read about this to know it, for I worked with a

gang of teenagers in a theatre for several years, and I know how the

theme of sex is never far away if it is not dominating the

environment. Then there is the factor that people who work together

often develop a greater intimacy than people who get married.

People who get married often cease to talk, and they lose a sense of a

growing intimacy. But people who work together keep on talking

and learning about each other, and sometimes even about their

mates. They have more time to talk at work often than mates do at

home. The result is people develop the inevitable feeling of desire,

and the work place becomes a breeding ground for the lust of the

flesh. People at work often spend hours a day in romantic flirting.

This is the very thing that mates are to do, but they don't do because

they are too tired after a day of work and flirting.

The work place is a dangerous place, not just because of industrial

accidents, but because of its predominant emphasis on sex in contrast

to love. If the Christian is going to have any impact in his work for

the cause of Christ, he or she has to somehow bring the love of

Sunday back to that Monday environment, and help people to see

that love is not a mere hot house flower too weak to survive in the

world of the work place. Christians bring some of the lust of the

work place back to the church, but it is suppressed. You don't walk

in and find men telling off-colored jokes, and you don't see them

poking one another and saying, "Did you see the legs on that gal in

the first pew." Lust is always latent in our lives, and can surface

even in a sacred setting, but we suppress it and say, "Get thee behind

me Satan."

But I wonder if we do not then do the same thing at work in