Hi, welcome to redeem the Commute. I’m Ryan, your host for the daily challenges. These daily challenges are meant to help you explore what it means to follow Jesus even in the midst of a busy commuting lifestyle. If you’ve never explored what it means to follow Jesus, I’d encourage you to check our Christianity 101 course first. It would be a great introduction to the things we try to put into practice in these daily challenges. Every week we follow a daily, weekly rhythm that helps us as a scattered community of people trying to follow Jesus in a busy lifestyle work together and learn together.

Every Monday we introduce the idea for the week. Every Tuesday we try to see where that idea is spoken about in the Bible. Every Wednesday, we see how the Bible’s take on the topic challenges and transforms our thinking. Thursdays, we try to apply it, put it into practice. Then Friday is a day for prayer and reflection on how the week has gone. Saturday we take a day of rest and then Sunday’s a day for community.

It’s especially important that followers of Jesus are gathering together regularly in community. That’s why we’re going to be starting a brand-new Christian community, a new church in Ajax this year. I’d love to hear from you if you’d like to be part of what we’re starting. If you’d like to be part of the team to get it off the ground or if you’re planning to be regularly attending our worship and community once it starts.

Right now, our challenges are following a series we call Reset. We’re looking at what it means to follow Jesus and how following Jesus resets every aspect of our lives. We saw first of all, how the language of born again leads us to this conclusion. Then, we’ve been looking in the subsequent weeks at how following Jesus impacts each area of life. We’ve talked about time; we’ve talked about money, talked about our goals. This week going to talk about how following Jesus resets our attitudes about work. Work is such an important thing to talk about. Most of us spend more time at work than we do sleeping. Takes up so much of our day. It drives how we organize ourselves, what time we get up in the morning, what time we get home, what kind of childcare the kids are in or not. It determines our income and how we spend our money as a result.

Our work has a lot to do with how our lives are planned and organized. We talked through the series about how following Jesus resets everything. Our assumption needs to be that yes, following Jesus does reset our attitudes about work. It changes how we work. The question we really need to explore is how. What’s that actually mean to say Jesus resets our attitudes around work? Maybe you have some stories in mind that have you concerned. You know, I just met somebody recently who had just become a Christian, and they proudly told me that they had quit their job and were studying theology now.

I heard about somebody else, who joined a different religion altogether, and when they did they quit their job, a decent paying job and took a much lower paying job, simply so they could be working with a member of their religion. They weren’t allowed to associate with people of other religions anymore. That put up some red flags, obviously. Maybe those kinds of stories concern you too. You think it means following Jesus always leads to quitting your job. Maybe you have to become a monk or something like that, or you have to join the priesthood.

I heard one interesting quote from Friedrich Buechner. “The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet. I believe the fruit of such a calling is joy.” Now that kind of attitude towards our work probably doesn’t sound so bad. We can’t completely withdraw from the world, but all becoming monks are quitting a job that puts us in contact with people of different religions. We wouldn’t be able to meet the world’s deep needs if we all withdrew from the world as followers of Jesus. Following Jesus also isn’t about working to the bone with no joy. There’s meant to be a deep joy found in serving the deep needs of the world.

I know one friend who found himself so overwhelmed by his work and his career, so overwhelmed by the sense that he needed to be moving upwards, up the corporate ladder that he eventually found it was crushing him, and it was crushing his family. It was crushing his marriage. He left that job. After a period of uncertainty, a challenging time, found himself in work that was much more fulfilling, where he found himself serving others, caring for others, where he was finding deep joy in meeting the world’s deep needs. He was still using some of the same skills he learned from his education and in the early years of his career, but he found that it wasn’t joyless and it wasn’t disconnected from the world anymore. He was able to be a follower of Jesus in his work.

Sometimes we have to pause and reassess our ideas of what upward or downward mobility mean. Yes, my friend might be making less money than he did before. Yes, he put a career on hold for a little while, but he firmly believes that had he continued down the path he was going it would have led to his destruction. Sometimes we think our choices before us are just a choice of whether I go upward or downward. We don’t realize that continuing to pursue upward mobility at all costs could be ultimately the source of our demise, can actually be a choice between having any work, anyway, to support ourselves or our family or nothing, if we find ourselves so physically, spiritually and emotionally broken as a result of having pursued all the wrong things in life.

Whether it’s money, power, prestige or something else, our work can lead us to a path of destruction if we have our sense of upward and downward mobility mixed up, we think upward mobility is just about making more money, having a higher position in this world, we’ve missed the point that there is far more to this world than what we see right now. There’s far more to this world than money and career. I’ve got a question for you to think about before we get into this a little bit more this week. Our question is, “Do you think Christians are meant to work differently from others?” How and why?

Just a reminder that we’re reading the Bible in sync as a community right now. Make sure you check our website or app to see what today’s Bible reading is. Even while were scattered, we can be gathering together virtually to read the Bible together, to grow and learn as followers of Jesus. Hope you have a great discussion with a group you’re hopefully working with. If you’re not, think about who you could share our challenges with. It’s a great opportunity to connect to the deeper level with some friends or colleagues. Have a great one. I’ll see you tomorrow.

Read the Bible in Sync Today

Ryan Sim - March 31, 2014

Monday - A New Idea - Reset Death

Hi. Welcome to Redeem the Commute. I’m Ryan, your host for the daily challenges. The daily challenges are meant to help us explore what it means to follow Jesus, even in the midst of a busy commuting lifestyle. We have a rhythm that we follow each week to help us explore our topic. We introduce the idea on Monday, then Tuesday’s we study it in the Bible. Wednesday’s we try to let the Bible’s teaching sink in, and change and transform our thinking. Thursday’s we try to act out what we’ve been learning. Friday’s a day for prayer and reflection, and then Saturday’s a day for rest. Sunday is a day for community, because even when we are scattered and busy, it is important that we come together as one community to explore Jesus and what it means to follow him in one place. That’s why this Fall we’re planning to launch a new worshiping community in Ajax called Redeemer Church. Stay tuned for more information. We’re in the middle of a series right now called Reset, where we look at how following Jesus resets our thinking about various topics in life. Most have been topics we think about daily, but today we look at how Jesus resets death. Our culture doesn’t like to talk about death, but it’s what we’ll do today. It’s more important than you might think. George Bernard Shaw once pointed out, 1 out of every 1 people die. This topic is guaranteed to impact your life! CS Lewis pointed out in WWII, war does not increase death rates, death is total in every generation. Yet, our generation and culture would rather avoid even talking about it, as if that means we can avoid death itself. Add to that our Botox for wrinkles, all our other potions and lotions to stop aging, and you have the picture of a culture that avoids death itself until the last possible moment. At many funerals, you’ll find people avoid saying anyone died. One Christian minister I know was asked to do a non-Christian service, with the funeral director specifying that the family wants to "write it themselves, without any interference or argument from the priest.") I can only imagine what the family was hoping to avoid. One of the words in the funeral service I almost say most carefully is that the person (by name) “has died”. Sometimes it feels like I’m the first one to say it, when everyone else is saying “passed on”, “lost”, and even saying “loved one” instead of the person’s name name. I do that because for those who follow Jesus, death isn’t something to fear so much we pretend it doesn’t happen. It’s not something to keep quiet, but something to acknowledge as having limited power in our lives. I think people need to hear that. One US study asked Americans if they wanted to read the Bible, and if they did, what they’d like to learn. The largest single topic of interest was that 28% of adults want wisdom from the bible on death and illness, and a surprising 33% of young adults wanted the same. They want to hear how there is hope leading up to, in and after death. That’s what we’ll do this week. The world keeps saying to fear, avoid, delay, ignore death. Jesus says, it’s okay, you’ll survive if you follow me. Question: How do you approach death? Is it something to fear, embrace, or somewhere else on the spectrum?

From Series: "Reset"

When our computers get bogged down and unmanageable, we know to hit a reset button to simply start over. Wouldn't a reset button be great in life? We know it would be complicated, with all our responsibilities and routines to consider, but imagine the freedom and refreshment of a new start in life! What would you do differently? What would you pay more attention to, and what would you ignore? How would you avoid getting bogged down and broken again? The great news is, in coming to earth as Jesus Christ, God has begun to "reset" our universe, our world, and even us. We're invited to start over with him, in what he calls his kingdom. We're invited to start a new life with a clean slate. What gets wiped clean, and lived differently, when God resets our lives? We'll explore how God resets these key areas of our lives: Reset: Goals Reset: Time Reset: Money Reset: Work Reset: Body & Food Reset: Sex & Marriage Reset: Family Reset: Compassion Reset: Nature Reset: Society Reset: Death Join us for the next several weeks, and invite God to reset your life.

Discuss

More From "Reset"

Powered by Series Engine