Hi. Welcome to Redeem the Commute. I’m Ryan your host for the Daily Challenges. It’s Wednesday. It’s the day we take the topic we’ve been exploring all week. We try to see how the bible’s words on it challenge and transform our thinking. This week we’re talking about how following Jesus resets everything including our views of work. We saw that yesterday in the bible by exploring a challenging passage one where Paul was writing to the church in a city called Colossae and he spoke directly to those who were bondservants, kind of a mixture of employees and slaves in our thinking today anyway, and those who owned them.

The jest of what he was telling them was to act as if they were not wholly owned. Even though a slave was wholly owned by somebody else they were to act as if God owned them and to remember that those who thought they owned them on paper were their earthly masters not their real ones. The same way those who own slaves were to treat them with dignity and respect as human beings owned by God, not owned by another human being.

Challenging stuff for us to wrestle with because of the ways these passages have been abused and used to condone terrible oppressive slavery, but also the way that it applies to our world today it’s not always easy to see. That was my question for you yesterday to try to figure out how this actually connected with our world of employment in the 21st century. I think it’s pretty true though to say that slavery is alive and well. It’s alive and well for real when people are enslaved for sex trafficking and things like that or when they’re paid extremely low wages overseas and oppressed and we don’t even know it. We’re just buying products and we don’t know where they came from and who made it under what kind of conditions. Those are examples of modern day slavery.

Another form maybe a bit closer to home we can be slaves to work. We can be slaves to our own work yes we can. There are some signs that Christian author and speaker Timothy Keller tells us to watch out for. One thing to watch for is if our work becomes our sense of security in this life. If we don’t have a sense of what we would do if we lost our job. If everything underneath us would crumble. If we would have no foundation in life. If we feel that our work and our income is supposed to insulate us from life’s tragedies then we need to be careful. Tim Keller says that he gets asked often by those in high level jobs and positions how terrible things can happen to them. People say life wasn’t supposed to be like this. He says I have never heard a working class person say that. So many working class and poor people simply know that life is full of challenge and difficulty and tragedy and yet those with resources tend to think implicitly or explicitly that wealth and work can insulate us from life’s reality.

When our work becomes our sense of security we need to pay attention to what kind of work we’re really pursuing. What our real goal in life is. If it is something eternal, unchanging and safe and solid and secure or whether it’s something that simply has that appearance. The other thing that Tim Keller says to look out for is when our work begins to give us our sense of identity and confidence in life. He spoke about people he knew who because of their success in one area of life would pontificate at dinner parties about every other area of life about which they knew nothing. Their sense of confidence and authority in their work made them think that the whole of their being was completely knowledgeable about everything and completely confident and completely correct. We take our work one aspect of our lives and we make it the whole of our identity and that’s very dangerous.

The other way our sense of identity and confidence in ourselves can get all out of whack because of our work is when we start to think that we are our own saviors. That our work whatever we are a part of whether it’s our work ourselves or our work as a human race can somehow save all that we’ve done wrong. That we can completely fix our environment and the destruction we’ve caused. That we can completely find ways to be at peace with one another and end all wars. When we think that we eradicate all disease. When we come up with these things that we think we can work hard enough to achieve what we’re doing is we’re putting ourselves in the place of God.

We have thousands of years of human experience to show that we cannot save ourselves. Every time we get close to eradicating polio some other country has an outbreak. It’s tenacious. It’s like sin.  Sin is tenacious as well when we think we’re going to eradicate war. When we think we’re going to eradicate famine. When we think we’re going to eradicate any of these things that enslave us in this life we’re starting to elevate our work to the level of God and we’re saying that we can work hard enough. We can be good enough, perfect enough to save ourselves and it’s a very distorted view of our work.

If you’ve taken our Christianity 101 course you’ll recognize some of those things I just said as what we call the consequences of sin in Christianity 101. Sin messes with our sense of identity. It messes with our self-worth. It pollutes our lives. I can go on, but when we take work and we elevate it to God level that’s actually sin. Remember we defined sin last week as when we take something in this world even a good thing and we pretend it is our ultimate good and that’s ultimately very bad for us. We do that with work a lot. In the passage we explored yesterday I see three things that Paul specifically advises the workers, the bondservants to do given their present situation.

The first one he says is to keep working. He doesn’t tell them to run away. He doesn’t tell them to quit. He tells them to keep working. He doesn’t want followers of Jesus to withdraw from every area of life except those that have somehow been blessed and considered holy. He wants followers of Jesus to be in every area of life working for his Kingdom so he wants them to stay where they are. Now we live in a different world where slavery is not a reality for most of us who are watching this video and in that case we actually do have the option of leaving. We just want to check our motives though.

Are we leaving because we are enslaved to something dangerous and we need to escape it or are we leaving simply because we’re tired, lazy, bored, running away from something that’s difficult. We need to check our motives, but I definitely want to make sure that this isn’t seen as a message saying slaves who are oppressed, who are being violently abused need to stay where they are because God says they should stay where they are and bless people somehow. This isn’t meant to be used as justification for that. It is talking about a very different mode of slavery than what we would see around the world today or what we’ve seen in the last few centuries. We talked about that more on Tuesday.

The second thing that Paul said the bondservants should do is they should work well. They should not just be people pleaser’s, but they should actually genuinely work hard, work to do good work. The reason for that is that God created us to do good work. He said work was good. He gave humans jobs to do. He said it was good. God himself did work by creating the world. It was seen as work in balance with rest. What He wants us to do through the words of Paul and the Colossians is continue to work and continue to work well. Work as if those we work for are human beings who need us. Serve them as real human beings. Do our jobs in ways that show the dignity that’s in every human being that makes the world a better place that builds the Kingdom of God. Whenever we can find work that is consistent with God’s values for the Kingdom that’s a good thing or whenever we can do our work in ways consistent with God’s Kingdom that’s a good thing too.

Finally, he wants the bondservants to work for God to recognize they are not wholly owned by human beings. They are wholly owned by God and to work as if they work for God to see a higher purpose in everything they do. A higher identity in them than just servants. They are created in the image of God. He wants the bondservants to start living in God’s Kingdom even as they live in the broken Kingdom of this world. Even as they live in a world that uses slavery for all sorts of terrible things He wants them to start practicing the Kingdom of God even if they can’t escape that. He wants them to remember they are created for a different kind of world than the broken one we live in.

Imagine how that would impact the life of an employee today. What difference would we see when they’re working well and working for God. How would we work differently? Would the gossip change? Would the griping change? Would the stealing change? Would the laziness change? It sure would.

As a challenge if we’re going to be followers of Jesus in the working world we need to watch ourselves and say am I working or am I just going through the motions. Am I working well? Am I working to care for others and to be generous even to my boss? Even when they don’t deserve it. Even when they use and abuse me. Finally am I working for God? Do I recognize that everything I do here is for my true owner God who created me and not for my employer, not for anyone else. This is between me and God and so I’ll work well because God created work and it’s good for me to do good work. You can see how connected all three of these things are. To continue working, working well, working for God.

My question for you today is to think about how this looks in your work. What aspect of your work have you stopped doing that you need to start again? What aspect of your work have you not been doing well? How can you do it for God? Think through some of the aspects of your work and where that might apply. I gave some examples earlier. Maybe those apply to you. Maybe different ones apply, but think through the aspects of your work where you have been less than attuned to God’s Kingdom. Don’t do that alone. It’s going to be hard so do it with a friend. Share this with somebody you know from the train or bus or from work or from the neighborhood. Make sure you’re sharing these challenges. Start a little discussion group where you watch the videos wherever you are through the week and when you do come together in person you have something to discuss. It could be the start of a great friendship. Have a great discussion. Don’t forget to read the bible on sync and I’ll see you tomorrow.

Read the Bible in Sync Today

Ryan Sim - February 11, 2014

Tuesday - Study It - Reset Work

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.

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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