Today we’ll see some examples of building our work on God’s foundation.

We’ll look at four main categories of work: offered to God, or redeemed, subverted, or challenged for God.

Offered:
I knew an animator who I asked to design the opening credits for Redeem the Commute, and some other projects. She excitedly said yes, and lamented that no one ever asked here to do the work she loved as a ministry for God – other churches had always asked her to stack chairs!

Redeemed:
I knew a teacher who was moved to a new school in a rough part of town, where a depressing number of students come from families with addicitons and little support. She was not happy with the forced move, but then I asked her – what if God is putting you into these kids’ lives for a reason? There is a difference between teaching children for a paycheque, and teaching children because God loves children as his own, so that the teacher can see that God-given dignity in even the most difficult among them.

Subverted:
Imagine the same thing happening with the debt collector I mentioned on Monday. He could try to treat people with dignity, be gracious in encouraging them to get help, yet firm in that people should repay what they’ve borrowed. As he advanced in his job, he may be able to influence more humane practices across the board. But at some point, he may come up against a huge challenge…asked to extort, blackmail, extract crippling interest from helpless people, etc. Which brings us to:

Challenge:
That debt collector may find he just has to quit. The company may be conducting business in a way God can only challenge. But imagine if my friend took that expeirence and decided to start his own micro-lending firm!

How do you know which approach fits your work? It starts with knowing God’s story, and having a willingness to let it shape our lives. This is what our challenges are all about – learning and applying God’s big story, for the long term and in community.

Challenge: Consider your own work. Should it be offered, redeemed, subverted, or challenged? Discuss.

Then watch the attached video of Lyndsey, a teacher who sees her work through God’s story.

Ryan Sim - August 25, 2015

Tuesday - Study It - Finding Rest

In our day and age, it is hard to find rest. We are always connected and that has changed our hearts. We often feel important and needed when we can’t turn off our Blackberries, and can’t stop working. That’s today’s reality. In a different way, it was hard to find rest in Jesus’ day. It was simply hard work to survive, eat and sleep in shelter. But the Jewish people had one major distinctive, the day of rest God gave at creation, and that they had been instructed to preserve. But over time, a religious codification of law had been built onto God’s plan for Sabbath rest at creation. We see it in a story of some Pharisees, or religious legalists, and their conflict with Jesus here: On a Sabbath, while he was going through the grainfields, his disciples plucked and ate some heads of grain, rubbing them in their hands. But some of the Pharisees said, “Why are you doing what is not lawful to do on the Sabbath?” And Jesus answered them, “Have you not read what David did when he was hungry, he and those who were with him: how he entered the house of God and took and ate the bread of the Presence, which is not lawful for any but the priests to eat, and also gave it to those with him?” And he said to them, “The Son of Man is lord of the Sabbath.” (Luke 6:1-5 ESV) Here we can see how the Pharisees had made even a day of rest into hard work. The Sabbath, even as it’s observed today, can become a strange mixture of freedom and peaceful rest, and concern and anxiety for legal compliance. For example, I have a friend who lived in Israel for a short time, who would tell stories of a mad rush to get enough food before sunset on Friday when the Sabbath began. Then she’d take long walks to visit with a friend…all to avoid operating a car. What’s more work – walking or driving? Or at Toronto’s Mount Sinai hospital there is a Sabbath elevator that stops at every floor on Saturdays, so no buttons need to be pressed. You can see how carefully work has been defined – button pushing is too much, but walking is okay. The proper way to take Sabbath rest is still debated today – including debates on how strictly Christians should apply the Old Testament laws about Sabbath as a day of worship and rest. There is a clue here in the passage we’re exploring this week, where the Pharisees are confronting Jesus about his disciples eating on what was supposed to be a day of rest. They are plucking grain left for poor travellers like themselves, and rubbing it between their hands to make it edible, which was one of 39 types of work forbidden by the teachers of the law. Note how Jesus responsds. He doesn’t laugh it off as an old throwback idea. No, he takes it somewhere different, he seems to say rest is vitally important, and that it is what he’s all about. He says he’s the Lord of the Sabbath. We saw in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus’ intention is not to throw away the law, nor to adopt the Pharisees’ interpretation of it wholesale, but rather to fulfill its original purpose. He reveals the point of the whole law to be…himself! Question: What was your experience of weekends growing up? Was either day set aside as a day of rest?

Discuss

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