CONTENTS:

• JUST VISITING
• ASSUMPTIONS OBSTRUCT COMMUNICATION
• WORK AND ITS RELATIONSHIP TO THE HOME

JUST VISITING

Today is Labor Day. I've added a special study concerning the Christian attitude toward work. Work consumes a large portion of our lives and our families are directly dependent on the fruit of our labors. The study is something of a position paper on work and its relationship to the Christian faith.

Norman

On a recent Saturday, I received my "honey do" agenda from my wife. I heard her say, "We need to wash the rugs and mop the floor today." Two rugs occupy a permanent position on the garage floor, in front of our washer and dryer. The day before, I had noticed they were extremely dirty and needed washing. I assumed that she was talking about those two rugs. I was a little confused however, about mopping the garage floor. We had never done that. Later that morning, I stuffed the rugs into washer, swept the floor where they had rested and walked back into the house to prepare mop water.

At that point she said, "Why do you want to mop the garage floor?" I was thinking, "This woman's short term memory is in serious trouble." I reminded her of the "honey do" list. She said, "I was talking about the rugs on the bathroom floor." That made a lot more sense, because we do mop the bathroom floor. She insists that she specified the "bathroom floor" in the initial conversation. If she did there's a gap in my memory tape that has been permanently deleted.

Our little misunderstanding about which floor to mop does not endanger our relationship. At least I don't think it does. You might want to check with Ann. Nevertheless, it illustrates some serious problems that frustrate marriages more than they should. In the first place, when we either don't listen or listen selectively to our spouses, the other party invariably feels ignored and dishonored. In the second place, we often make a serious mistake when we assume that we understand everything the other person intended to communicate. So often our assumptions are wrong. Thirdly, when we hear something that doesn't quite add up, it's a relatively simple matter to say, "Did you mean to say . . . .?" That one little question could save all of us a lot of heartache.

Essentially, good marriage communication requires respecting and honoring your spouse enough to go the extra mile in making sure you understand each other. It is nothing short of an extension of the golden rule - "Do to others as you would have them do to you" (Luke 6:31). -

INTRODUCTION

NEGATIVE ATTITUDES TOWARD WORK

Some people feel like it is an experience in humiliation to be asked to report to their jobs. One worker told a sociologist that the most glorious moment in the entire day occurs at one minute before five, when he is permitted to leave the drudgery of his work. It makes you wonder if perhaps there aren't more people trying to avoid work than there are people who really want to work. Someone has said "There are three kinds of people; those who make things happen; those who watch things happen and those who have no idea why things happen."

Some Christians believe that we are being punished with work because Adam committed sin in the Garden of Eden. They think we would still be romping through the garden in our birthday suits, plucking fruit from the trees if Eve had left well enough alone and avoided the one tree that was a no-no.

People were made to work. According to Genesis 2:15 "The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it." That's before the fall. It is true that the burden of work was increased after the fall. But the curse is not work. God didn't place a curse on Adam; he placed a curse on the ground. The curse is thorns and thistles and my yard is a constant reminder that the curse is still in effect.

I know some jobs are not very exciting. I know people sometimes have to work in jobs under the direction of supervisors who abuse their position of leadership and make life miserable for their employees. Nevertheless, all Christians needs to have a clear understanding of their purpose in the world of work.

As Christians we are committed to a different standard of ethics, a different system of values and a different purpose in life and those different standards cover what we do from 8 to 5 Monday through Friday or however your work week is defined. It is very important for us to understand how the values of the kingdom affect us in the work place.

YOUR WORK IS SACRED

We have developed some neat little categories so that we compartmentalize our thinking and drop everybody in convenient slots. One of the ways we do that is to divide up our lives into sacred and secular groupings. Os Guiness, a British sociologist calls this privatism. People make spiritual commitments, but they are private. The private world is the world where you do the religious acts - the church building. We assemble there to conduct acts of devotion to God, carried out in the company of like minded people. We may be encouraged to reach out to others, when we assemble, but even then we are thinking. "This is the sacred world" and we never connect it with the secular world. The secular world - that's where you shop, transact business, seek entertainment and work. Guiness says that among people who claim to be Christians in America, the Christian faith is left outside that sphere of action.

I would suggest to you that there is no Biblical principle which would allow us to make that kind of distinction. Every honorable thing that a Christian does is sacred. That's what Paul had in mind in Colossians 2:18 when he said, "Whatever you do, whether in word or deed, do it all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him." We've applied that to the worship assembly, but look at it in context. Five verses later, Paul is talking about the application of that principle in the work place.

In Acts 20, we have account of Paul meeting with the elders of the church at Ephesus in the city of Miletus. In verses 18 and 19 he said to the elders, "You know how I lived the whole time I was with you, from the first day I came into the province of Asia. I served the Lord with great humility and with tears, although I was severely tested by the plots of the Jews." How was Paul serving the Lord in Ephesus? We are quick to answer, "He was preaching the gospel." And of course that's right, but that's not the whole story. He was also making tents. " You yourselves know that these hands of mine have supplied my own needs and the needs of my companions. In everything I did, I showed you that by this kind of hard work we must help the weak, remembering the words the Lord Jesus himself said: `It is more blessed to give than to receive'" (Acts 20:34-35). The thrust of all this is that when Christians perform acts of productive labor, they are doing the will of God and that makes it sacred.

WORK IS A CALLING

How do we know what our calling is? In 1 Peter 4:10, the apostle said, "Each one should use whatever gift he has received to serve others, faithfully administering God's grace in its various forms." We usually think of that as finding our place in the organized ministries of the church and certainly it applies to that, but it may be that a part of our calling is let people see Christ living in us in the work place. You may be the only person in your office or your plant who has responsible moral standards and when that happens it seems like you work in a terrible moral environment. You feel bombarded daily by immorality, paganism and ungodly standards, but have you ever stopped to think how bad it might be if you weren't there to be salt, light and leaven?

And besides that, you never know when somebody is going to look to you for guidance and direction from you when you least expect it. My wife, Ann, worked for ten years in the operating room of the same hospital. A surgeon on staff at that hospital had the reputation of having a "God complex." His operating skills were second to none; his social skills were practically non-existent. Even though he gave a month of his time every year operating without pay in the third world, he was not considered a deeply spiritual man. One day he took Ann aside and asked her Biblical questions dealing with some of the dilemmas he was facing in his life. Another time, late at night, when he lost a patient on the operating table, he looked to Ann for help and support to help him through the pain of losing one of his patients. Most people probably thought it didn't bother him, but it troubled him deeply and Ann was the person he chose to allow inside his defenses because he respected her as a Christian. That may happen to you. You may go along for years and think nobody is noticing and then one day when you least expect it, you are going to be there when someone needs to talk to a Christian. That's why I say your work may well be your calling.

Please don't read something into this that I'm not saying. I'm not suggesting that you leave your task undone, to pass out tracts, talk to a fellow employee about the gospel or conduct a prayer meeting at your desk. In Biblical times a lot of the work was done by slaves and even slaves were told to work heartily and to render service to their Masters as if they were doing it for the Lord. When you go to work tomorrow, your objective is to do your work well, knowing that you will glorify God in so doing, knowing that you are worshiping God just as surely as you are right now.

WORK IS A FAMILY RESPONSIBILITY

CONCLUSION

"I'm a little fed up with the constant criticism of American workmanship. How other people do their jobs is their business. But I do good work and I know it. I have perfected my skills. I make each moment count. When I make a mistake I correct it. I would gladly sign my name to every piece of work I do. I'm going to hang this message over my work area to let my employer, my customers, my co-workers know that I take pride in my work."

I have no way of knowing if that man was a Christian or not, but he has an understanding of the Christian work ethic. In the end, whether work is a fulfilling experience or a dreadful hardship depends on how we come to grip with ours relationship to God. We don't really appreciate our reason for working until we understand that God serves our chief executive officer. Everybody else is just penciled in for a little while. That's why it's so important to get spiritual priorities lined up right, because when Christ comes to live in you and live in everything you do, the impact goes far beyond what you do on Sunday.

NEXT WEEK'S FEATURE ARTICLE: "Who's Roy Rogers?"