Colossians: Ordinary Work as Sacred Work

So it is election week.

Perhaps you're super dialed into that.

Maybe you care a lot about it.

Like if you're it's all you've been thinking about since you woke up this morning, or perhaps you're not as dialed into it and um you don't care as much.

Perhaps we're probably most somewhere in between those two.

Um but most likely you'll feel some anxiety, some stress.

You'll be watching the news, and you can feel yourself getting more and more riled up for whatever reason.

And so I just want to take a moment for us as a church to pray for the election, for our leaders, and for our own hearts.

Let's pray together.

Heavenly Father, we come before you and we, as a church, we pause to remember and to proclaim that you are the king of this world, that you are King Jesus, we have one King, and it is you.

And for that we are so very grateful, so very grateful that we have true freedom.

We're also grateful for the country that we live in that we can gather to worship with freedom.

We're grateful that we have a vote.

We're grateful for the people that paid a price for us to have this.

We pray as we go to vote this week that you would give us great wisdom and discernment.

We pray for our election and for our leaders that would be honoring to you.

Grant that our government will serve your purposes under heaven, unite our country, protect our sacred liberties and rights, and defend us from every evil.

We pray that you would strengthen our country as a foundation of moral clarity and civic unity.

And all of this we pray for your honor, for your glory, and we pray it through the name of Jesus.

Amen.

Well, this year Pew Research surveyed and found that people in higher salary jobs are more satisfied with their job.

Big surprise.

I'm not sure.

Did that take a survey?

Did it take research?

Maybe somebody was getting paid a lot to do the survey, so they were satisfied in their work.

As well, a Gallup survey, only 30% of us think that our work is tapped into the thing that we do best.

For example, the thing I do best is to fly fish in a western valley, have a good beverage, have a dinner.

And I'm not doing that right now.

So I'm in the 30% that doesn't feel tapped into, right?

So maybe you're in that 30%.

So we have frustration with our work.

As well in that Gallup hole, only 18% of employees said they're extremely satisfied in their work or their job.

So that means about one in five of us are not extremely satisfied.

The rest of us are somewhere between, you know, eh, eh, you know, just kind of like two, two, like, oh, this is horrible.

But only one in five of us are going, like, this is fantastic, this is amazing, I'm in my calling, I have right where God wants me.

Like the rest of us have all this, we have frustration with our work.

So maybe that's you, or maybe you work in the home as a parent or retired, and so your work is your home, your work is your family, your work is volunteering.

And so today I want to talk a little bit about our work.

Now, we've been studying our way through the book of Colossians.

We've been learning those promises we have in Colossians 1 and 2, everything we have in Jesus.

All these, the full forgiveness of Jesus because of the cross, the full righteousness of Jesus because of the cross, all the worth of the identity we have, that we don't have to use the world to know we are a secure, worthy person.

All of that is lavish in one and two, and then we start to get these applications in three and four.

We've been talking about loving others, our marriage, parenting, and now Paul comments on work.

What we've been saying is how we should live is fueled by what is already true about us.

So how we should work is fueled by what is already true about us.

Point number one is this we are beloved sons and daughters of the Heavenly Father before we are our roles and practices.

We are already a beloved son and a beloved daughter before we ever enter our work.

That's what Paul's been teaching us.

Now, for Paul to talk about work in Colossians, he has to talk about slavery.

The word uses bondservant because this slavery is more like indentured servanthood than the new world race-based slavery we tend to think about.

This Greco-Roman slavery, it was not the kidnapping and the abuse of New World slavery.

Greco-Roman slavery was not ideal.

It was not freedom, but it was not new world slavery.

These slaves that Colossians is speaking to, these slaves were paid wages.

They were not allowed to quit or to change employees, employers.

The slavery was more that indentured servanthood.

They were in slavery average of 10 years.

They were stuck there.

So maybe that feels exactly like your job.

You're like, that actually, I understand now.

That's me.

Slaves might be prisoners of war, they could be criminals, or they could be a person working off their debt.

And what we see in Colossians, and we see it in Ephesians 6, and we see it in 1 Corinthians 7, is Paul regularly calls Christian slave owners to a different way of viewing and treating their slaves.

He calls for a kind of treatment of people that will eventually create the end of slavery.

So the point is this is that the Bible never called for an abolition of slavery, but biblical theology destroyed the heart of slavery by changing the hearts of the people in the system.

So I say all that for us to enter our passage and begin to pull out of it what it could possibly say for us and for our work.

Colossians 3, verse 22.

Colossians 3:22

Bond servants obey in everything those who are your earthly masters, not by way of I service as people pleasers, but with sincerity of heart fearing the Lord.

Point number two is this God frees our hearts from pleasing people to pleasing God.

Paul wants even slaves to know, even a slave, that they may be a slave, but they don't have to be a people pleaser.

That they can be free from needing other people's approval.

Right?

Isn't it exhausting taking your umbilical cord and just continuing to plug it into other people, trying to suck life from them?

Do you like me?

Do you approve of me?

How do you view me?

Am I approved of you?

Do you approve me?

Right?

That is an exhausting way of life.

Colossians 3 23.

Whatever you do, work heartily as for the Lord and not for men.

After college, I went to work for a construction product company.

They paid for my seminary and I worked there for five years total.

I drove 55 minutes down I-85 to an office warehouse behind the Dunkin' Donut in Tucker, Georgia.

I cleaned out a big closet.

It was being used as a closet before I got there.

Put my desk in there.

I mean, do you remember on the office, the TV show, The Office, when Jim moved Ryan's desk into a closet?

Like, I'm Ryan.

I'm the temp fire guy.

That's me.

Like, I'm that was my office in a closet.

I shipped out engineering notebooks.

I planned seminars.

The highlight of the day was the mail would come at 1 p.m.

and the office manager did the deposit slip, and then he would walk down to my office and hand me the deposit slip and the checks, and I would walk the deposit up to the bank.

So I'd go out the back door, I'd cut through the woods, jump a fence, I'd walk through another office park, cross the office depot parking lot, then go to the bank.

That was the highlight.

Okay?

So I'm just saying that to say I didn't love my job.

Like I wasn't fulfilled by my job.

I was grateful, but it was not fulfilled.

And my boss was fantastic, which is great because I married his daughter.

So that was a you know pretty big job perk along the way.

There was nothing wrong with the job.

But there was something wrong with my heart.

Like I needed to learn a lot.

I needed to learn about waiting.

I needed to learn about joy in the Lord, not in my particular circumstance.

And I needed to learn this Colossians 3.23.

Whatever you do.

Work heartily as for the Lord, not for men.

Our work is set free because we don't just work for people, we work for the Lord.

It gives great value and esteem to the very work that you do, whatever the work is.

Now let's jump to Colossians 4.1.

Masters, treat your bondservants justly and fairly, knowing that you also have a master in heaven.

I love how Paul continues to attach all this horizontal life, all the incredibly practical life, your work, the thing you do, just the job you wake up to, so practical.

And he keeps connecting it to our relationship with God.

These things are connected.

And the more we're secure in God, Colossians 1 and 2, the more that this horizontal, the very practicals of our life, of work, we can go and have a meaningful job.

That Colossians 4 1, it bridges into our lives and says this.

Point number three, the call of leadership or employer is to care for those you lead.

Now it seems basic, but it gets lost when people are difficult, right?

People can be the worst.

Not you, but other people.

Not me, other people.

But people can be difficult, or you're trying to reach a goal or make a profit, and we can lose the fact that our call, if you lead anybody's, to care for them.

In college, I worked summers delivering ice cream and I saved up all my money.

And then in the semester I wouldn't work.

And so I'd go to class and then I'd go to the Ramsey Center and work out, and then I'd come home and have lunch.

I'd take a little nap.

And then I'd study a bit.

And then I'd go to Intermirfolds and throw frisbee.

There was a lot of frisbee in my college life.

Lots of frisbee.

It was amazing.

And then I graduated.

And nobody told me.

It's just over.

It's just, it's just awful.

Nobody tells you.

It's horrible.

There's no frisbees.

Frisbees are gone.

You will never see that many frisbees again in your whole life.

I mean, 55 minutes down I-85 in the morning to sit in a closet.

No windows.

8 to 5, 55 minutes home, then it's dark.

You just like watch a lost episode and you go to sleep.

That was the day.

It took about a year, and then I was depressed and I didn't know what to do.

So I was a young 22-year-old moron.

The prefrontal cortex has not formed yet.

And so I asked my boss, who I was not even dating Christy at this point, he was just my boss.

I said, Hey, can we have lunch together?

And we never did this, so he knew something was up, and we sat down in a sandwich shop and I said, Um, thank you so much for your generosity in this job, and the company's paying for a seminary, it's amazing.

And then because I'm a moron, I said, I and I I want to quit.

This was my solution.

I was quitting.

And he just kind of nodded along, okay, interesting.

And he said, Well, how will you pay for your seminary?

I don't, I don't know.

It'll work out, you know.

And then he just listened to me whine for a bit.

Just I think I whined for 15 or 20 minutes, like you know, I and I think what he sensed was this boy is overwhelmed.

And he just said, Hey, why don't you just scale back your days?

And let's just see how it goes.

So I scaled back and later on I scaled back up.

But I made it through.

My boss, now father-in-law, he was not defensive.

He was not offended.

He listened to me and he cared for me.

He was up, he was a boss.

If you're a boss, if you lead anybody your job, you are called, not just to be their supervisor or their manager, you are called to care for them.

So, bosses, this means that your employee is no less important than you.

And you are to provide what is right and fair to them.

Not just constantly try to squeeze out of them everything you can get out of them.

Now, if you're the employee, it means that your boss is no better than you.

Now, they may act like it, but they're not.

They're not more important.

They're no no more word, they're different, they have a different job, but they're no more important than you.

And Paul says for you to work with all your heart.

Because you don't just work for them, but you actually work for your Heavenly Father.

Now Paul speaks to work itself in verses 23 through 25.

Whatever you do, work heartily as for the Lord and not for men, knowing that from the Lord you will receive the inheritance as your reward.

You are serving the Lord Christ.

For the wrongdoer will be paid back for the wrong he has done, and there is no partiality.

Point number four is this ordinary work can be sacred callings.

In 1 Thessalonians 4, Paul writes to a church on how to love each other.

Here's what Paul writes and to aspire to live quietly and to mind your own affairs and to work with your hands as we instructed you, so that you may walk properly before outsiders and be dependent on no one.

He's esteeming the ordinary life, the value of just an ordinary, because most of us are just incredibly ordinary.

Right?

And most of us work very ordinary jobs.

Most of us are never gonna work in a ministry setting.

We're just gonna work jobs.

And those jobs, that work, can be sacred.

By the 1500s, Paul's thought, that thought of valuing work itself, it was gone by the 1500s.

The church abandoned it, lost the value of work.

And there was a sharp distinction between the sacred and the secular.

The church began to teach that if the real spiritual work, the real spiritual people, is in the church and in the monastery, but not the farmer.

And everyone believed that.

Everyone believed that the monk was closer to God than the farmer.

But then Martin Luther showed up.

And Martin Luther said, the farmer's work is as valuable as the monk.

In his book, God at Work, Gene Edward V, he explains it this way.

He says, Luther says that vocations are a mask from God.

That is, God hides himself in the workplace, the family, the church, and the seemingly secular society.

The priesthood of all believers did not make everyone into church workers.

Rather, it turned every kind of work into a sacred calling.

And that is incredibly freeing and relieving and esteeming.

Veith calls this doctrine of vocation a theology for ordinary life.

If your work is helpful to others, if it benefits society in some way, then you are loving your neighbor with your work, and then that makes it sacred.

That is such a rich theology for us, for ordinary life, for what we do day in and day out.

Last point, point number five.

As we grow more secure in God's love, our work no longer defines us.

We're finding definition in Jesus.

That's what Colossians 1 and 2 gives us before we even talk about our work.

Tim Keller says we often undervalue our work or we overvalue our work.

If we undervalue it, we just don't care.

We don't work hard.

We lack heart and we lack grit.

Or we overvalue work and it takes functional power over us because it's become an idol, a little g God.

Instead of looking to God for value and worth, we're looking to a job.

Before I started this church with a group of people, before we started this church, I worked at a very big church down in Atlanta.

The place is beautiful.

It looks like the Ritz-Carleton when you go in there.

It's unbelievable.

You've never seen so much oak crown molding in your life.

And I loved it.

The first day I showed up, though, for the interview, all I had one pair of khakis and one button-up shirt.

That's all I owned.

The khakis were cargo pants.

So, I mean, it was, I, you know, I was walking into a Ritz-Carleton church wearing the only pair of khakis.

The only, I was like, hope there's not an interview too.

Because I gotta buy more clothes.

And I did, I had to go buy more clothes for the next interview.

And I got the job, and I quickly realized when I was out in the community, and people would say, What do you do?

That's what we do in America.

What do you do?

That's question number, what's your name?

What do you do?

What do you do?

And I would say, Where I work, and people would go, ooh.

And I would go, Yeah.

Like I loved it.

I did.

I loved it.

I loved when I said where I worked, and people were like, Wow, good for you know, good for you.

And I just, I just, my ego just blossomed.

You know, I just loved it so much.

It made me feel important, it made me feel worthy.

And then I started a church.

And let me tell you, ain't no glory.

The whole church fit in my garage.

Like, and everyone could have fit in the garage with the stuff.

The stuff was in my garage.

This pulpit was in my garage for years.

And I'd load it in the back of the truck every Sunday morning and drive it up to the preschool where we unstack the.

Anybody unstack the chairs with me in here?

Remember the chairs?

A lot of kingdom work is chairs.

I don't know if you church, like every think about how many chairs there are in this building.

A lot of church and ministries that need a seminary class on chairs, is what they need.

A lot of chair work.

And there's just nothing glorious.

So all that, like, and you'd say, like, where you worked.

Even now, I'll say, like, but probably you know what I'm talking about.

Where do you go to church?

If they go, where?

And you're like, well, it's by the railroad tracks.

You know, some real glorious location, you know.

We love the pull importance and worth from our jobs.

When we're honest, we probably swing from like undervaluing, like, oh, it doesn't matter, I don't care, to overvaluing, and it means too much.

And what Paul is teaching us is so profound, because it rescues us from both of those dangers.

That we can be fully beloved sons and daughters in Jesus alone, fully worthy, apart from any of our production or our work, so that when we come into our work, we're already esteemed and worthy, and we can just work heartily.

We're not underworking, we're not overworking.

It's a gospel paradox.

Only when we find our rest in Jesus can we find meaningful work.

We have to be at rest in Jesus in order to work for Jesus.

Now perhaps right here you have a question about that, or maybe you have another spiritual question, and after service, there'll be a pastor down front.

I'd love to answer those questions for you.

Let's pray together.

Heavenly Father, we thank you.

It's in you and you alone that we can find forgiveness, righteousness, worth, and definition.

Forgive us for the ways that we overvalue our work and try to find justification there and keep looking.

Forgive us for the ways we undervalue our work and we do not work heartily.

Help us to live in Colossians 1 and 2 the deep and rich promises of Jesus that define the very core of who we are as your beloved sons and daughters, so that we might come before our work, whether it be in the home, family, volunteering, or the workplace, and we might be able to work for you and honor you with our work.

In Christ's name we pray.

Amen.