Hi, welcome to Redeem the Commute. I’m Ryan, your host of The Daily Challenges and today is Tuesday, so it’s the day we take the topic we’ve explored this week and we try to see what the Bible has to say about. Yesterday I talked about how following Jesus means a reset to everything in life, including our attitudes around our work. That can be hard because work is such an overwhelming aspect of our lives. It can drive so much of what we do and say in life. We spend most of our waking time working. Even if it’s unpaid work, it’s still work that we find ourselves engaged in day to day. We need a sense of how do followers of Jesus see work a little differently than others. It’s going to come from an unlikely source. It comes from a letter than Paul wrote to Christians in a city called Colosse. It’s called the letter to the Colossians and as part of that letter, directly addressed what he called bond servants.

Here’s what he had to say. Bond servants, obey in everything those who are your earthly masters, not by way of eye service, as people pleasers, but with sincerity of heart, hearing the Lord. 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. Masters, treat your bond servants justly and fairly, knowing that you also have a master in heaven. Well, bond servants isn’t really a term we use very much today. For us, it’s probably analogous to employees, but back then, bond servants were sort of a blend of what we would know as employees and what we would call slaves today. It’s hard because slavery has changed over the centuries.

When we think of slavery in our culture, we generally think of North American slavery and the horrors and oppression of that mode of slavery. No kind of slavery is all right, but we just want to understand a little bit of the culture that Paul was writing to. It was a culture where slavery was very much a reality. It may have been an unquestioned reality for people. It was just the way of the world worked. What Paul does is he undermines a little bit. He subverts it. You can hear him speaking directly to the bond servants, the slaves. Those who, for one reason or another, found themselves wholly owned by someone else. What he does is he tells them they are not wholly owned, even though that’s what it may say on paper, even though that’s what people may assume in their culture.

Those who happen to be followers of Jesus are being told directly by one of Jesus’ first followers, one of his apostles, that they are not wholly owned by their earthly masters. He distinguishes between the earthly masters and their Heavenly Master. They are actually wholly owned by their Creator, by God. Although in this world, the kingdom of this world, there maybe people who think they wholly own other human beings, they are not. Can you imagine the freedom that comes from knowing you are not wholly owned when everybody you know thinks you are and when the legal system thinks you are wholly owned by someone else. Imagine the freedom that that gives to someone in a system that oppresses them, knowing that they are free.

Now, unfortunately, this passage and others like it, have been used to condone horrific abusive forms of slavery like those we’ve seen in North America in the last few centuries. Those need to be condemned and they have been condemned by Christians. Unfortunately, there are those who have found in the Bible words that they could twist and use to justify terrible crimes. That’s happened. It continues to happen and Christians need to continue to read the Bible as a whole to wrestle with God’s words in the whole of the Bible about the dignity of human beings and speak out when that kind of oppression happens at all and especially when it’s justified using the words of the Bible twisted for people’s selfish gain. One of the biggest hints that this passage can’t really be used to condone slavery where people are wholly owned and abused and oppressed is that Paul addresses his passage to the bond servants and to the slave owners. What he wants the slave owners to know is that they need to remember the dignity in every human being. That those who work for them are not wholly owned by them. Those slave owners will have to answer to God some day because He is the one who created us all and who owns everything on this earth including the atoms that we were put together with. They are all His and although we have care of it for a time, what we could call stewardship, like an investment advisor takes care of somebody’s money, we take care of God’s creation.

We need to remember that we are not our own and we are especially not in any position to own and control and abuse another human being. He wants both slave owners and the bond servants to have the same attitude of seeking out first the kingdom of God where all humans have equal dignity, where all humans are equal in the sight of God, where all humans have a responsibility to care for one another, to be generous with one another. There is a lot of great material in this passage, obviously, and it’s culturally hard for us to catch because it does speak about bond servants and slave owners and that’s hard for us to understand today. Tomorrow we’re going to try to enlighten what this has to do with our modern working life. In the meantime, I want you to try to think about that. Your question for today, which I hope you’ll share with others, maybe start a little discussion group, is this, what might this say to employees today? Is there any way that we, today, can be owned by our work?

Well, I hope you have a great discussion. This one is certainly a topic that can get people going, so I really hope you do share this with somebody. Remember, we’re reading the Bible in sync as a community. If you’ve been following us for a little while, make sure you’re reading our daily Bible passage as well. It’s just another way that our community tries to stay in sync even though we’re not meeting together in person very often. We can continue learning to follow Jesus as one community in scattered mode so our gathered mode is all the more exciting when it happens. Have a great day. I will see you tomorrow.

Read the Bible in Sync Today

Ryan Sim - March 11, 2014

Tuesday - Study It - Reset Compassion

Reset

Hi welcome to redeem the commute, I’m Ryan your host of the daily challenges. Today’s Tuesday is the day we explore in the Bible our topic for the week and this week we’ve been talking about how following Jesus resets our views of compassion and service to others. We saw yesterday how people can show compassion for a lot of wrong reasons. They can be doing it to increase their profile and image. They can be doing it just to get volunteer hours. They can be doing it to somehow earn a reward from God or good karma. Whatever it might be, these are selfish reasons to do something that would otherwise have been selfless. A true act of compassion is something selfless and sacrificing. When we gain from that it ceases to really be compassionate and is actually about showing compassion to ourselves. We’re finding ways to serve ourselves by serving others. Followers of Jesus aren’t meant to benefit themselves from serving and caring for others, are they supposed to do it and if so why? There was an article I saw making the rounds on Facebook a couple weeks ago from the Onion a satirical news source. The article was headlined Local Church full of Brainwashed Idiots Feeds Town Poor Every Week. Sources confirmed today that the brainwashed morons at First Baptist Assembly of Christ all of whom blindly accept whatever simplistic fairytales are fed to them volunteer each Wednesday night to provide meals to impoverished members of the community. “Unfortunately there are a lot of people in town who have fallen on hard times and are unable to afford to put food on the table so we try to help out as best we can.” said 48-year-old Kerri Bellamy, one of the mindless sheep who adheres to a backward ideology and is incapable of thinking for herself, while spooning out homemade shepherd’s pie to a line of poor and homeless individuals. At press time, the brainless, unthinking lemmings had donated winter clothing they no longer wore to several needy families and still hadn’t opened their eyes to reality. Well the Onion is a source of satirical news but as satire works it always reveals something that’s somewhat true. Here we have an article that actually does a really good job of pointing out that those who appose Christianity for whatever intellectual reasons they might have can often do it without much compassion. I have a hard time wrestling with the fact that those who they think believe something untrue find that it drives them to great acts of service and compassion for others. A whole concept of modern hospitals has arisen from the church. Many schools have their origin in the Christian church. We can go through many of the ways that our society particularly western society cares for the poor and needy and although it’s managed by our government today or it’s managed by a nonprofit organizations without explicit Christian connections very often the very notion of serving the poor and needy in our culture has come from Christian faith. It’s easy for opponents of Christianity to attack a few easy targets especially distant ones like crusades hundreds of years ago or religious persecution that may happened in places far away around the world. In reality there are millions of Christians every day simply serving the poor and needy in their community, giving up high paying jobs to go and work for a nonprofit. Flying halfway around the world to help build homes and schools, the list could go on but there is something to Christian faith that has driven people to acts of service and compassion even when there is nothing in it for them. This isn’t a new thing either, hundreds, thousands of years ago we can find Christians serving others even at their own expense. In some of the earliest days of the Christian church there was a plague that hit Rome and one early historian and Christian bishop Eusebius wrote the following about how the Christians acted in that community. “All day long, some of them, (the Christians) tended to the dying and their burial; countless numbers with no one to care for them. Others gathered together from all parts of the city a multitude of those withered from famine and distributed bread to them all.” You can see how even in its earliest days followers of Jesus were those who stayed when others fled. In those days if you could flee the city during hardship whether it was a famine or a plague or otherwise, you could get out of the city and fend for yourself you did. If you had the resources to do that you took advantage, yet it seems to have been the Christians who were remarkable for having stayed behind to care for those who were sick even if it meant they were going to become sick themselves. Why would people be so sacrificial? What model had they seen? What motivation did they have? Well, I think we can find it in the words of Jesus. Here’s what Jesus said, “For I was hungry and you gave me food. I was thirsty and you gave me drink. I was a stranger and you welcomed me. I was naked and you clothed me. I was sick and you visited me. I was in prison and you came to me.” Then the righteous will answer him saying, “Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you? Or thirsty and give you drink? When did we see you a stranger and welcome you or naked and clothed you? When did we see you sick or in prison and visit you?” The king will answer them, “Truly I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.” What Jesus has done in that teaching is he’s reset our view of ourselves and others. Imagine if a plague hit our community, others would suddenly become a risk to our health and well being. Think back to when [inaudible 00:06:19] happened, suddenly we started to see each other differently. Others were potential risks, they might get us sick, they might kill us. People stayed home, they got out of town if they could. I remember traveling during that time and people being afraid of me because I was Canadian. It was a time when humans became a risk and that’s a time for followers of Jesus to overcome that risk and to say you know what we still need to serve one another. Be careful, take the necessary precautions but we’ll do what we need to do. At the time I was a volunteer paramedic and I remember the fear that struck many of us and yet we felt we still needed to do our jobs. Followers of Jesus are meant to be the same. We’re meant to continue doing our jobs of serving others as if they are Jesus Christ himself simply because it’s what followers of Jesus do even when it’s a great risk to ourselves, even when it’s a sacrifice, even when it calls for us to give more then we think we can handle. What Jesus has done is he’s reset our view of ourselves and others. Others have shifted from being risks to opportunities. We shifted from being victims to being potential hands and feet of Jesus serving others whom he loves as well. I’ve got a question for you to think about today. Question: Who are you afraid to help? Who do you think is a risky person to help? How does following Jesus transform them from a risk to an opportunity to serve in Christ’s name? I hope you share this discussion with somebody else you know, somebody from the train or the bus from work or from your neighborhood, just somebody you know who can watch the videos on the same days as you and whenever you’re together you can discuss. We’ve got a growing network of these small groups and please let me know if you’re discussing these challenges regularly with others, I’d love to hear about your group and what you’ve been discussing. Have a great one, I’ll see you tomorrow and don’t forget we’re reading the Bible in sync as community as well. See our website or app to see today’s Bible reading, bye for now.

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.

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