PART 35 : WORK

Ephesians 6: 5–9 “Servants, respectfully obey your earthly masters but always with an eye to obeying the real master, Christ. Don’t just do what you have to do to get by, but work heartily, as Christ’s servants doing what God wants you to do. And work with a smile on your face, always keeping in mind that no matter who happens to be giving the orders, you’re really serving God. Good work will get you good pay from the Master, regardless of whether you are slave or free.

Masters, it’s the same with you. No abuse, please, and no threats. You and your servants are both under the same Master in heaven. He makes no distinction between you and them.” (The Message)

Comment:

The word ‘work’ will mean different things for different people depending on what we are engaged in. For some it will mean paid employment where we work for someone or have to manage others who work for us, for others it encompasses the environments we volunteer in, for others the study we are involved in, for others our recovery, for others the caring of loved ones and for others the seeking of employment. In whatever form our work takes Paul wants to ensure we live with the right perspective…a perspective that liberates us in our work.

Paul wants us to understand that ultimately the one we work for is Jesus.

This does not mean we are working hard to impress Jesus or to earn something from Him or to repay something to Him.

Rather it is to understand that work offers us a unique opportunity for worship and mission.

Our work has a deep purpose.

Worship…that in all we do, we seek to do it as an act of love, adoration, devotion to Jesus in response to His unconditional, unfathomable love for us.

Mission…that in all we do we are seeking to reveal to others this amazing God who is love.

This liberation in understanding all we do is for Jesus, doesn’t just impact how we see work as worship and mission it also liberates us in our identity and value. We are liberated from seeing any sense of our identity and value coming from what we do as we realise our identity and value are always supremely found in Jesus.

We are therefore liberated to understand that we are uniquely placed by God to do all we do as an act of worship and mission. This provides a totally different perspective to Monday mornings, starts of shifts, deadlines, assignments, paths to recovery, caring for a loved ones etc…

PAUSE…remember who you are working for

Question for you to think about:

How can I live today with a perspective that my work is worship and my work is mission?