Latest / Topeka Bible Church Audio Archive / September 3, 2017 | Really? - There Are Spiritual Jobs, And There Are Job Jobs.

Transcript

September 3, 2017 | Really? - There Are Spiritual Jobs, And There Are Job Jobs. · Topeka Bible Church Audio Archive

0:00
SPEAKER_00: Good morning.
0:02
SPEAKER_00: I am gonna miss those stick figures because this is number 12 and the last in that series.
0:11
SPEAKER_00: And um so anyway, happy Labor Day weekends, and I hope you have a great weekend, great time, especially uh today and tomorrow.
0:27
SPEAKER_00: And uh we're in this series that we're finishing.
0:30
SPEAKER_00: If you're just visiting today, you get the the final uh one of this series, or a theme in this series, as uh came from our greatest, our my favorite theologian, uh, who said life is hard.
0:45
SPEAKER_00: It's harder when you're stupid.
0:48
SPEAKER_00: So we like John Wayne.
0:51
SPEAKER_00: Uh there's the psychological term, I I'll finally spring it on you, for what we've been talking about uh during this series, about why smart people believe dumb things, and that psychological name for it is cognitive illusions.
1:09
SPEAKER_00: That was the headline or the title of the article in the British Psychology Today magazine explaining that uh smart people can believe crazy things because our minds, all of us have our minds cognitively.
1:25
SPEAKER_00: We can believe things that appear true, we can think that we're seeing and understanding things that aren't actually there.
1:32
SPEAKER_00: And of course, there are a lot of physical examples of this, like staircases that you look at that who knows what direction they're going.
1:41
SPEAKER_00: So uh we're talking about the kinds of things that can happen to the best of us, cognitive illusions, and the one we've come to this morning in our final week is one I selected out of many options I had, because this is Labor Day weekend.
1:56
SPEAKER_00: So, what I selected is this there are spiritual jobs and there are job jobs.
2:03
SPEAKER_00: And the person who usually says something like this to me is thinking inside themselves, sadly, and I work a job job.
2:13
SPEAKER_00: And I don't, sometimes I don't quite know how to respond to that really quickly.
2:18
SPEAKER_00: In fact, I was thinking yesterday, there are a number of things that people say to pastors that they don't know how to respond to.
2:25
SPEAKER_00: Six things I don't know how to reply to are when someone comes up after church, says somebody invited them to church and says, I like your preaching, but I really like, and then they name someone else.
2:37
SPEAKER_00: Or when I get a phone call at say eight in the morning, you know, which is halfway through my day sometimes, and the people go, Did I wake you up?
2:46
SPEAKER_00: And, you know, uh, I go, really?
2:50
SPEAKER_00: Or third, uh, when there's a phone message, and someone who assumes that you don't really do all that much goes, call me back immediately.
3:01
SPEAKER_00: Or number four, how much longer do you think you'll be at TBC?
3:04
SPEAKER_00: I never quite know what they have in mind when they ask that, whether I can make them happy if I said two months or if if I don't know.
3:14
SPEAKER_00: So number five, and now we get to the ones that reflect the title for the morning, I wish I had your job.
3:21
SPEAKER_00: Once I was talking with a guy, my office had been out of a job for a couple of years.
3:26
SPEAKER_00: Young guy's in his 20s.
3:28
SPEAKER_00: I was trying to actually talk him into going to work, and but but the government was giving him a check that was, as he figured, he had it all done mathematically, that was about two-thirds, he figured, between a half and two-thirds what he would make if he went and got this job he was looking at.
3:44
SPEAKER_00: And he was weighing and he thought, no, it's better for me just to get to relax all week long and get free money uh until it till it runs out.
3:52
SPEAKER_00: So I'm trying to talk him into getting a job.
3:55
SPEAKER_00: And I go, come on, let's talk about what you'd really love to do.
3:58
SPEAKER_00: What would you really like to do?
3:59
SPEAKER_00: And he looked at me and honestly said, I wish I had your job.
4:02
SPEAKER_00: I'd like to work your job.
4:04
SPEAKER_00: And I knew what he meant because he really meant, well, you know, I'd love a job that only required me to work month one morning a week, and I just get to come.
4:12
SPEAKER_00: I'm good at talking to people, so I could just talk.
4:16
SPEAKER_00: So um, sometimes when people say that though, they then clarify, and this is the sixth thing.
4:22
SPEAKER_00: What I mean is I wish I had a spiritual job like yours.
4:28
SPEAKER_00: Wish I worked in full-time ministry.
4:30
SPEAKER_00: So I want to talk about that this morning and why I think that's a dumb thing that some smart Christians think or say.
4:36
SPEAKER_00: And I have four texts, four verses out of the Bible that I'd like to direct your attention to.
4:41
SPEAKER_00: The first one comes from Genesis 2, the second from Genesis 3.
4:45
SPEAKER_00: In Genesis 2, we read the Lord God took Adam, took the man, and he, ha Adam, the Adam, the man, and he put him in the Garden of Eden.
4:54
SPEAKER_00: By that I think he means both the man and the woman.
4:56
SPEAKER_00: To for two purposes, to work it and to take care of it.
5:01
SPEAKER_00: And what we learn from this text is, first of all, that we were created to work.
5:06
SPEAKER_00: It's human to work.
5:08
SPEAKER_00: It's our commission from God.
5:09
SPEAKER_00: It's one thing that actually separates us from animals.
5:13
SPEAKER_00: Not that animals don't dig in the ground and work in a way, but you know, we were commissioned in Genesis 1 to rule over the animals and over there.
5:22
SPEAKER_00: Our work has a kind of divine commission and purpose that God never gave the animals.
5:27
SPEAKER_00: It's human to work.
5:29
SPEAKER_00: As Dorothy Sayers, the wonderful writer, said, work is the natural exercise and function of man, the creature who is made in the image of the Creator, who in chapter 1 of Genesis, remember, worked six days.
5:44
SPEAKER_00: And I love writings.
5:47
SPEAKER_00: I love Dorothy Sayers, but not only do I love literature, some of you know I love sports, and my favorite, maybe my favorite sports writer of all time, Jim Murray, now passed away, predates most of you, but he was a writer for the LA newspaper, and he wrote a number of books.
6:02
SPEAKER_00: And I uh saved a bunch of his columns, and I was reading uh one over recently.
6:08
SPEAKER_00: It was an article about the the brief retirement of Sugar Ray Leonard, the boxer, when he was like 26, 27, and how he got so bored that he came back to fight again.
6:18
SPEAKER_00: And Jim Murray was writing about his own retirement and boredom, and he said, maybe, his last line in the article was, maybe hell is where you've got nothing to do.
6:29
SPEAKER_00: And I thought, for a sports writer, that's pretty pretty good theology.
6:33
SPEAKER_00: And maybe hell is where you have nothing to do because I know in heaven we're gonna be working.
6:40
SPEAKER_00: So the first point is we're created to work, Genesis 2 tells us.
6:43
SPEAKER_00: But the second thing is you notice that there's two purposes, and one is an offense, and the other is defense.
6:50
SPEAKER_00: I just picked my fantasy football team, therefore I am really familiar with this.
6:55
SPEAKER_00: Offensively, we must work.
6:57
SPEAKER_00: That is, we have to get up in the morning when we don't feel like it, we have to sweat, we have to labor, we have to take initiative.
7:03
SPEAKER_00: But on the defense, there are always attacks upon work.
7:06
SPEAKER_00: There's things that make work hard, there are things that would steal work away from us, and so defensively, we have to keep it or take care of it, depending on your Genesis 2 translation.
7:17
SPEAKER_00: We have to guard and protect our work from things that would wreck it.
7:20
SPEAKER_00: If you're a farmer, of course, it's weeds.
7:23
SPEAKER_00: If you have cattle, it's disease and so forth.
7:26
SPEAKER_00: Now that's the first type.
7:28
SPEAKER_00: The second text of the four is Genesis 3, 17 and 18.
7:31
SPEAKER_00: And now the fall of man.
7:33
SPEAKER_00: Man has rebelled against God, and so God looks at man and says, Because you listened to the voice of your wife and ate of the tree of which I commanded you, you shall not eat of it.
7:42
SPEAKER_00: Cursed is the ground because of you.
7:46
SPEAKER_00: In pain, this is the line, in pain you shall eat of it all the days of your life.
7:50
SPEAKER_00: Thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you.
7:53
SPEAKER_00: You shall eat the plants of the field.
7:55
SPEAKER_00: Folks, this is why we have Dilbert cartoons, all right?
7:58
SPEAKER_00: Because of man's fall, work now is often painful, oppressive, and tedious.
8:04
SPEAKER_00: And Solomon could write in Ecclesiastes 2, uh, 4 through 11, he could say, I built lots of houses, I amassed lots of wealth, but in the end it just seemed meaningless to me.
8:15
SPEAKER_00: If your work ever seems tedious, if it seems boring, if it seems meaningless, it's because of the fall of man ever since Genesis chapter 2.
8:25
SPEAKER_00: Work has changed in such a way, the earth has changed, so that it cries out for deliverance to a time when our work will again, as it was for Adam and Eve in paradise, when our work will be nonstop, meaningful, joyful, and so forth.
8:41
SPEAKER_00: I don't know that it'll be nine to five with two weeks' vacation a year.
8:44
SPEAKER_00: I think it'll feel like vacation all the time.
8:47
SPEAKER_00: But work right now for some of you, am I right, is tedious, it is oppressive, sometimes takes advantage of you in some places around the world, and it's often painful.
8:58
SPEAKER_00: So that's the second, but and yet, and this is the third verse, and yet under God in Christ, if you're a believer, back then the matter is, God will still bless and praise work that is done with intelligence, wisdom, trustworthiness, diligence, and all-out effort.
9:16
SPEAKER_00: The great example is the ideal woman, she's called the wise woman of Proverbs 31, who considers, she considers a field and buys it.
9:25
SPEAKER_00: From her own income, she plants a vineyard.
9:28
SPEAKER_00: Notice the intelligence, she considers a field.
9:31
SPEAKER_00: Notice the wisdom, the shrewdness to pick it out.
9:34
SPEAKER_00: Three, the trustworthiness, her husband trusts her.
9:37
SPEAKER_00: Now, I don't recommend to husbands that they buy a field without consulting their wives, or wives that they buy a field without consulting their husbands.
9:45
SPEAKER_00: That's uh the price of land has gone up so much that that would be that would sort of exceed the$100 limit that Melody and I, you know, set on.
9:54
SPEAKER_00: If it's more than$100, call me.
9:56
SPEAKER_00: So that that kind of a that was that was a long time ago.
10:00
SPEAKER_00: So um, but guys, listen, don't buy a$6,000 Harley without calling her first.
10:07
SPEAKER_00: Just just saying.
10:09
SPEAKER_00: Just saying.
10:09
SPEAKER_00: I haven't done it, but I have a friend who did.
10:11
SPEAKER_00: It didn't work out.
10:12
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
10:13
SPEAKER_00: And then diligence plants a vineyard, all-out effort.
10:18
SPEAKER_00: She actually worked the vineyard.
10:21
SPEAKER_00: Wow.
10:21
SPEAKER_00: Okay?
10:22
SPEAKER_00: And now the fourth verse, Colossians 3, 23 and 24, whatever you do, work.
10:27
SPEAKER_00: Oh, this is such a great verse.
10:29
SPEAKER_00: Let's just let's read this off the screen together, okay?
10:34
SPEAKER_00: Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart as working for the Lord, not for men, since you will receive an inheritance from the Lord as a reward, it is the Lord Christ you are serving.
10:51
SPEAKER_00: This this verse actually says at least four things, and those four things are first, uh, that Christians who understand what the Bible teaches about work will work diligently.
11:08
SPEAKER_00: Let's work at it with all your heart.
11:09
SPEAKER_00: And they'll work enthusiastically.
11:11
SPEAKER_00: Notice the word heart.
11:13
SPEAKER_00: They won't just go, thank God it's Friday.
11:15
SPEAKER_00: You may actually find yourself going in on Monday and going, thank God it's Monday.
11:20
SPEAKER_00: I know, that's weird.
11:22
SPEAKER_00: But but that's because you realize it's a blessing from God, as Hank said in his prayer 10 minutes, 15 minutes ago.
11:30
SPEAKER_00: And you work diligently and you work enthusiastically.
11:34
SPEAKER_00: And third, you know you're working for the Lord, that He's your ultimate boss.
11:38
SPEAKER_00: I mean, if you own the company, you're still working for somebody.
11:42
SPEAKER_00: God's your boss, you're working for.
11:44
SPEAKER_00: And fourth, you wait for a reward.
11:47
unknown: I can't.
11:48
SPEAKER_00: Last week, one of the top Christian theologians in this country who's written this big theology that I that I use that I really like, actually said, I don't think I've ever heard a message on rewards, which is a real tragedy.
12:02
SPEAKER_00: And I'm thinking, well, you never visited Topeka Bible Church.
12:04
SPEAKER_00: We talk about rewards all the time.
12:06
SPEAKER_00: And his point was the New Testament is full of promises of reward for God's people, that God wants to reward us.
12:14
SPEAKER_00: Now, and the great word, the person who works hard at whatever job he does will receive a reward from the Lord.
12:23
SPEAKER_00: Jay Vernon McGee, anybody else listening to him, Joe?
12:25
SPEAKER_00: Don't keep your eye on the clock, keep your eye on the Lord.
12:27
SPEAKER_00: He's the one whom you are serving.
12:30
SPEAKER_00: Okay, so those are my four texts for this morning, and now we'll sort of apply them as it comes to this statement.
12:36
SPEAKER_00: There are spiritual jobs and there are job jobs, and I unfortunately work a job job.
12:41
SPEAKER_00: And when I read through the Bible, I think of people just standing up out of the text and saying, Really?
12:47
SPEAKER_00: I think of Gideon, who is a farmer, who had sheep and so forth, and I think of him saying, Really?
12:53
SPEAKER_00: This is not a spiritual job that I am doing.
12:56
SPEAKER_00: I think of Daniel, who is a government official, who's consulted, you know, with and you know, by Nebuchadnezzar.
13:04
SPEAKER_00: I think of him going, Really?
13:06
SPEAKER_00: This is not a spiritual job?
13:07
SPEAKER_00: I think of Dorcas, the seamstress in the New Testament, and Lydia, the businesswoman in Philippi, who will actually go down by the water next May.
13:16
SPEAKER_00: Melody and I are leading a trip over to Greece and the islands, and we'll see where Lydia and that early church gathered in Acts chapter 16.
13:25
SPEAKER_00: And I think of them going, Really?
13:28
SPEAKER_00: My job isn't spiritual at all?
13:30
SPEAKER_00: Or I think of Dr.
13:31
SPEAKER_00: Luke, Luke the physician.
13:33
SPEAKER_00: There are spiritual jobs, and he's thinking, okay, so it's only when I write the third gospel I'm doing something spiritual, and and and see, this is this just feels weird to me.
13:43
SPEAKER_00: Now my question is, where did this idea come up, come from, that some jobs are more spiritual than others?
13:53
SPEAKER_00: And if you if you forgive me, it'll just be a quick couple minutes of philosophy.
13:57
SPEAKER_00: The idea actually came from uh the first Greek philosopher who wrote anything.
14:03
SPEAKER_00: We don't, Socrates predated him, but the only reason we know about Socrates is Plato wrote about him.
14:08
SPEAKER_00: So this would be the great Greek philosopher just before Aristotle, Plato.
14:13
SPEAKER_00: And Plato argued very uh uh very significantly there were two worlds.
14:20
SPEAKER_00: On top, there was a world of forms, right?
14:23
SPEAKER_00: There was it was the world of mind, it was an invisible world up there, it was an infinite world, it was the higher world up there, okay?
14:33
SPEAKER_00: And then down below, there was this evil world.
14:35
SPEAKER_00: It was the world of matter, the world of flesh, the world of body, it was visible, it was finite.
14:41
SPEAKER_00: Sorry, I left it infinite.
14:43
SPEAKER_00: It was the lower world.
14:44
SPEAKER_00: You've heard of Platonic love, right?
14:46
SPEAKER_00: I have a Platonic relationship with her or with him.
14:49
SPEAKER_00: You know, just friendship, that means it's on that higher level.
14:52
SPEAKER_00: You know, it doesn't involve, you know, sweat and emotions and palpitating hearts, okay?
14:58
SPEAKER_00: So you can see that if you divide, and by the way, uh, you're sitting, uh, some of you are sitting in pews, and College Avenue sitting in chairs.
15:06
SPEAKER_00: His illustration, Plato's was, was was actually he said, the idea of the pew or the idea of the chair is far more important and noble and sacred than the actual chair itself.
15:22
SPEAKER_00: So that chair you're sitting in, that's just happens to be a temporary, a temporary illustration, a temporary, you know, building of the actual idea of the chair, which is the most important thing.
15:33
SPEAKER_00: And here I know right now you're going, I'm sure I'm glad I'm sitting in a real chair rather than just the idea of a chair.
15:40
SPEAKER_00: But you can see if you make this distinction that all of a sudden, all of a sudden you get Christians involved, there's it's sort of a difference between the sacred and the secular.
15:49
SPEAKER_00: You understand where we're going with this?
15:51
SPEAKER_00: Not up and down if you're with me at all.
15:53
SPEAKER_00: I I'm done with the philosophy now, okay?
15:55
SPEAKER_00: So just pretend.
15:56
SPEAKER_00: Okay, now so that means this the sacred stuff, the stuff that's more important is stuff like church and worship and prayer and evangelism and Bible study and missions and God and religion.
16:09
SPEAKER_00: Okay?
16:10
SPEAKER_00: And then there's the secular stuff like education, work, play, arch and entertainment, government, science.
16:20
SPEAKER_00: I mean, don't tell me you don't know about this distinction.
16:23
SPEAKER_00: I mean, tonight I'm gonna come and talk about a trip I took down the Grand Canyon a month or two ago where uh young Earth geologists were there and they argued that the Grand Canyon was more likely formed, you know, really quickly rather than over billions of years or whatever.
16:37
SPEAKER_00: And so I'm gonna share about that.
16:38
SPEAKER_00: And tonight, but you know, you know this huge distinction that that scientists and a lot of other people go, well, you guys believe whatever you want there with your Bible and religion, and we'll take the historical side of things.
16:53
SPEAKER_00: Now, this is what actually really happened.
16:55
SPEAKER_00: This is science, okay?
16:57
SPEAKER_00: Because science and faith don't mix.
16:59
SPEAKER_00: You guys have the realm of faith, do that on Sunday morning, that's cool, and we'll take the actual, you know, science and history.
17:06
SPEAKER_00: Well, that's a distinction, that's a distinction that's not found, of course, in either reality or in the Bible.
17:13
SPEAKER_00: But of course, that distinction was huge in the Greek world, which is why when Paul went to Athens and he went to the Areopagus, that means the hill of Ares or Mars, the god of war, which is still there, this huge rock.
17:27
SPEAKER_00: I love going to this.
17:28
SPEAKER_00: We'll go to that uh next May in Athens, and it overlooks the city, and that's where all the philosophers would gather and argue.
17:35
SPEAKER_00: And so Paul starts preaching to them, right?
17:38
SPEAKER_00: And then he gets to the fact that now God's not only up there, but he came to earth in bodily, fleshly form, Jesus.
17:48
SPEAKER_00: And then Jesus died, you know, bloody death, and then he rose bodily from the grave, and it says some of them sneered because that doesn't fit.
17:58
SPEAKER_00: You know, that that Greek, that sort of what became later to be called Gnostic idea that the mind is important, but not the body.
18:07
SPEAKER_00: But the Bible doesn't understand, the Bible's, Bible, the Bible from the very beginning has God caring about the body as much as the spirit or soul.
18:16
SPEAKER_00: I mean, just a short little example, Moses, Aaron, Nadab, Babihu, and 70 elders went up to the top of Mount Sinai to see God.
18:23
SPEAKER_00: I don't know if you know that a bunch of them got to see God.
18:25
SPEAKER_00: And so God, but notice, notice it says, and they, it's Exodus 24, 11, and they saw God and they ate and drank.
18:33
SPEAKER_00: This combination of the spiritual and the physical that you don't find in other religions.
18:39
SPEAKER_00: You don't find in the Eastern religions, you know, you don't find it anywhere else.
18:42
SPEAKER_00: This the Bible is just full of the emphasis on the body.
18:46
SPEAKER_00: Rick Warren says it well.
18:47
SPEAKER_00: He says, God created it, Jesus died for it, the Spirit lives in it, I'd better take care of it.
18:53
SPEAKER_00: And he's speaking about the body.
18:55
SPEAKER_00: Okay, so um, let me share with you uh um talking about this this distinction between the sacred and the secular, let me mention to you just some other ideas started coming to mind, and I call them five silly geese from the same family.
19:11
SPEAKER_00: Okay?
19:12
SPEAKER_00: Other lines that I hear that are related.
19:16
SPEAKER_00: One that uh I see Hank out here, the Hank and I have heard for decades is full-time Christian work is a higher calling.
19:27
SPEAKER_00: Really?
19:29
SPEAKER_00: I mean, if you're a Christian, aren't you a full-time Christian?
19:32
SPEAKER_00: Aren't you a 24-7 Christian?
19:34
SPEAKER_00: Aren't you supposed to be devoted to Christ 24-7?
19:38
SPEAKER_00: So you're full-time Christian, and so when you're at work, wouldn't that be full-time Christian work?
19:44
SPEAKER_00: Okay, I know what you mean by that, but is it really a higher calling?
19:49
SPEAKER_00: Does the Bible ever consider it that way?
19:52
SPEAKER_00: Daniel?
19:54
SPEAKER_00: David the king?
19:55
SPEAKER_00: Really?
19:56
SPEAKER_00: Would being the priest be a higher calling than being David the king?
20:00
SPEAKER_00: I I don't think so.
20:02
SPEAKER_00: Or I hear people in the ministry shouldn't live like normal people.
20:10
SPEAKER_00: Oh boy, do I have stories.
20:12
SPEAKER_00: Oh my goodness.
20:14
SPEAKER_00: So I so I had my grandson in my arms and I walked, uh I was uh I think Saturday morning and I was out at the soccer game of another grandchild, you know, I was wearing shorts and sandals or thongs or something.
20:26
SPEAKER_00: And there was a woman from the church was there, and she goes, Wow, I've never seen your legs before.
20:32
SPEAKER_00: And I think I said, I know, it's it's horrific.
20:35
SPEAKER_00: And then I mean it's it's I don't know why why I would ever show them in public.
20:40
SPEAKER_00: But I know what she meant.
20:41
SPEAKER_00: She meant you wearing shorts and sandals.
20:44
SPEAKER_00: I didn't know you were normal, or you know, whatever.
20:48
SPEAKER_00: Or the sex thing is uh sorry about this.
20:53
SPEAKER_00: This has happened more than once in my career because of the wife I have.
20:57
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
20:58
SPEAKER_00: So I walk out in the welcome center.
21:01
SPEAKER_00: And Melody motions me over.
21:03
SPEAKER_00: She's talking, talking with this.
21:06
SPEAKER_00: I don't remember whether it's a woman or a man.
21:08
SPEAKER_00: And she calls me over and she says, you know, she came and asked me, she says, in a Bible study, and they're having this argument.
21:14
SPEAKER_00: She started, she's she said she was gonna talk to you, but she thought she'd talk to me and she and you know, and find out because we're having this big argument of what it means in 1 John when it says in chapter 3, and you know she's going into this, and she said, I stopped her, and I just said, Stop.
21:29
SPEAKER_00: I just sleep with the man.
21:31
SPEAKER_00: So I look at the lady and say, What's the issue?
21:33
SPEAKER_00: And she's so paralyzed from my wife saying that and thinking that Jim sleeps with somebody that you know.
21:41
SPEAKER_00: But it's not as bad, by the way, as as uh leadership leadership journal, you know, a ask Pastor Stroden the most ridiculous thing they'd ever heard.
21:50
SPEAKER_00: Well, Pastor wrote in that, you know, they'd adopted three kids, and those are the only children that they had.
21:55
SPEAKER_00: And and so they're in their lobby or whatever.
22:00
SPEAKER_00: Afterwards, a woman came up and looked at the three adopted kids and so forth and said to him, I kid you not.
22:06
SPEAKER_00: That's great.
22:07
SPEAKER_00: I think it's much better when ministers have their children this way.
22:11
SPEAKER_00: So, anyway, uh so I'll stop.
22:14
SPEAKER_00: I'll stop.
22:15
SPEAKER_00: I could go on.
22:16
SPEAKER_00: Hank, we could tell stories.
22:18
SPEAKER_00: People in the ministry shouldn't live like normal people.
22:20
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
22:21
SPEAKER_00: Third, pastors and elders.
22:23
SPEAKER_00: Now you hear this.
22:24
SPEAKER_00: This isn't this is something deacons sometimes feel that causes stress.
22:28
SPEAKER_00: Pastors and elders do spiritual ministry, deacons do the everyday secular stuff.
22:33
SPEAKER_00: Okay?
22:34
SPEAKER_00: And you can have that feeling because Acts chapter 6 does set out different roles, doesn't it?
22:39
SPEAKER_00: Different tasks.
22:40
SPEAKER_00: So the elders are set apart, you know, to do the tasks.
22:44
SPEAKER_00: They were praying.
22:45
SPEAKER_00: We will pray and devote ourselves to the study of the word or the teaching of the word.
22:50
SPEAKER_00: Okay?
22:50
SPEAKER_00: And so they gave the deacons the care of the widows and these other things.
22:54
SPEAKER_00: But somehow the idea comes in at times, and the deacons can feel it, that our job is not nearly as spiritual.
23:01
SPEAKER_00: But what we what we forget is that there is no declaration that somehow the elders there in Jerusalem or the apostles were any more spiritual than those deacons.
23:10
SPEAKER_00: In fact, if you look at the deacons, those seven deacons that they appointed, I mean, think of Stephen, think of Philip.
23:16
SPEAKER_00: Those guys, we respect those guys spiritually as much as we respect any of the other apostles.
23:21
SPEAKER_00: I mean, we put them up there, right?
23:23
SPEAKER_00: With Peter, James, John.
23:25
SPEAKER_00: They are that spiritual.
23:26
SPEAKER_00: They are that godly.
23:28
SPEAKER_00: No, it's not as though one ministry, elders, is more spiritual than deacons.
23:34
SPEAKER_00: Or that the deacon's ministry is secular.
23:37
SPEAKER_00: No, no, no.
23:38
SPEAKER_00: No, they're both spiritual.
23:41
SPEAKER_00: Or related.
23:42
SPEAKER_00: You hear this sometimes.
23:44
SPEAKER_00: We shouldn't run this church like a business.
23:46
SPEAKER_00: Now, normally, the time you hear that the most is when you've had to let a staff member go who wasn't producing for whatever reason.
23:54
SPEAKER_00: And nowadays, of course, you can't explain when you let someone go, whether you're in a church or a different business.
24:00
SPEAKER_00: You can't just tell everybody why.
24:02
SPEAKER_00: But and so the friends of that of that person will always come and say, I can't believe you're running the church like a business.
24:11
SPEAKER_00: And you understand their pain, but but you but you want to say at that point, now hold it.
24:16
SPEAKER_00: Um so running a business is an unspiritual thing?
24:20
SPEAKER_00: I mean, in your business, you know, that's not spiritual?
24:24
SPEAKER_00: You know?
24:25
SPEAKER_00: Or you want to say something like, so we should run this like a bad business?
24:30
SPEAKER_00: You know, or I you know, the the bottom line is that business is good, and and a church, especially church of our size, has to run like a business.
24:40
SPEAKER_00: We have W-2 forums.
24:41
SPEAKER_00: We have a number of staff.
24:42
SPEAKER_00: We have to decide, I mean, we own a property, as you know.
24:45
SPEAKER_00: We spent hours discussing what our project would be, and of course we were shrewd and how we selected who was going to do that and how much it would cost.
24:54
SPEAKER_00: And so we do that like a business.
24:56
SPEAKER_00: And and Doug will evaluate each of the staff members a couple of times a year, and we go through all kinds of processes.
25:03
SPEAKER_00: We have retirement plans.
25:05
SPEAKER_00: So the church, I know a lot of churches that have shut down because they've been run like a bad business.
25:09
SPEAKER_00: No churches that have shut down because they were run like a good business.
25:13
SPEAKER_00: And finally, finally, the fifth silly goose from the same family is you sometimes hear something like this God's salvation, Jesus, heaven.
25:22
SPEAKER_00: Uh uh, nothing else really matters.
25:27
SPEAKER_00: And you something inside you says, yeah, some truth to that.
25:31
SPEAKER_00: But listen, this is a discussion that's gone on above our heads.
25:35
SPEAKER_00: One of my favorite writers, but an atheist, a confirmed atheist named H.
25:39
SPEAKER_00: G.
25:39
SPEAKER_00: Wells, wrote a hundred years ago, if there is no God, and that's what he believed, if there is no God, nothing matters.
25:47
SPEAKER_00: If there is a God, nothing else matters.
25:50
SPEAKER_00: Really?
25:52
SPEAKER_00: I much prefer what the author Madeline Langle writes, she wrote A Wrinkle in Time and a number of other books.
25:58
SPEAKER_00: There are two ways to look at life, she wrote.
26:01
SPEAKER_00: There is a God, therefore nothing else matters.
26:04
SPEAKER_00: There is a God, therefore everything else matters.
26:11
SPEAKER_00: I think the second is correct.
26:13
SPEAKER_00: There's absolutely nothing trivial in your life to God.
26:18
SPEAKER_00: Nothing.
26:20
SPEAKER_00: Not when you get up, not when you go to sleep, not what you eat, not how much you exercise, not whether you come to church or when you come to church, not how you live in your family, or whether or not you're gonna try to resolve a relationship that's broken down this week.
26:39
SPEAKER_00: Nothing is trivial to God.
26:44
SPEAKER_00: Now, I I'll confess to you that you may pick up books now and then that say something different than what I'm saying.
26:52
SPEAKER_00: For instance, and I usually don't name names, but there's a book that came out not too long ago called The Power of the Call.
26:59
SPEAKER_00: There are people who talk about the call in such a way, frankly, you can't find it in Scripture.
27:06
SPEAKER_00: What they do is they take Jeremiah's call and they say, well, that call happens to preachers today, and therefore preachers and missionaries have a higher calling than anyone else.
27:15
SPEAKER_00: And Henry Blackaby wrote in his book, no one else in society, writing to pastors, no one else in society has a greater or higher calling.
27:23
SPEAKER_00: This call to the ministry is an incredible call, unequaled by any other vocation or calling.
27:30
SPEAKER_00: I'm sorry, that's that's not biblical.
27:33
SPEAKER_00: I know that caters to a certain view that pastors are told in some Southern Baptist seminaries, he's Southern Baptists, but I mean, and I love the Southern Baptists, but but um that's just not true.
27:46
SPEAKER_00: That's that's not what the Bible says.
27:49
SPEAKER_00: No, I prefer, I much prefer to go to, say, Martin Luther.
27:53
SPEAKER_00: Your work is a very sacred matter.
27:56
SPEAKER_00: God delights in it.
27:58
SPEAKER_00: Through it, he wants to bet uh best his blessings on you.
28:01
SPEAKER_00: This praise of work should be inscribed on all tools on the forward and faces that sweat from toiling.
28:06
SPEAKER_00: Or maybe my favorite author, Gerard Manley Hopkins, or not author, but poet.
28:11
SPEAKER_00: It's not only prayer that gives God glory, but work.
28:15
SPEAKER_00: Smiting on an anvil, sawing a beam, whitewashing a wall, driving horses, sweeping, scouring, everything gives God some glory.
28:23
SPEAKER_00: If being in his grace, you do it as your duty.
28:26
SPEAKER_00: To go to communion worthily gives God great glory.
28:30
SPEAKER_00: But a man with a dung fork in his hand, a woman with a slop pail, give him glory too.
28:35
SPEAKER_00: He is so great that all things give him glory if you mean they should.
28:42
SPEAKER_00: And then in a recent book by a nice guy, if you ever met him, uh, Dennis Hawk, says, Because Christ is Lord of all, he says in his book, The Rest of Success, because Christ is Lord of all, there is no dichotomy between physical and spiritual, sacred, secular and sacred, we must purge our minds and speech of notions such as full-time service and secular careers.
29:07
SPEAKER_00: Anybody ever been in one of those Shaker's furniture stores where you see that their theme was hands to work, hearts to God.
29:15
SPEAKER_00: I have a similar theme, I think, that that uh um that I like, and that would be full of heaven.
29:21
SPEAKER_00: I want to be full of heaven, but I want to be down to earth.
29:24
SPEAKER_00: Both of them, sacred and secular.
29:27
SPEAKER_00: So let me summarize what I've tried to say this morning before the Lord's table.
29:31
SPEAKER_00: Spiritual and secular jobs are both noble and pleasing to God.
29:34
SPEAKER_00: Spiritual and secular, and I don't use those terms, but that's spiritual and secular jobs, the way we hear, are both noble and pleasing to God.
29:42
SPEAKER_00: Second, small and great tasks are both noble and pleasing to God.
29:46
SPEAKER_00: You say you have a big job, I have a small job.
29:48
SPEAKER_00: Doesn't matter in God's sight.
29:50
SPEAKER_00: Small tasks are noble and pleasing to God.
29:53
SPEAKER_00: Do them for the glory of God.
29:54
SPEAKER_00: Small tasks, great task.
29:56
SPEAKER_00: And third, paid and unpaid jobs are both noble and pleasing to God.
30:00
SPEAKER_00: Stay at home mom, stay at home dad, great.
30:03
SPEAKER_00: You're not paid for that, doesn't matter.
30:05
SPEAKER_00: Volunteer worker at the church, unpaid job, sorry.
30:08
SPEAKER_00: Gonna take water down to Houston?
30:10
SPEAKER_00: Fine.
30:11
SPEAKER_00: Unpaid job, but that's pleasing to God, even though you're not being paid for.
30:16
SPEAKER_00: Don't make that distinction.
30:17
SPEAKER_00: Are you going to school to prepare to work a job that you'll be paid for in the future?
30:21
SPEAKER_00: Fine, you're not being paid now.
30:23
SPEAKER_00: Unpaid job, pleasing to God, noble and pleasing, spiritual, secular, small and great, paid and unpaid job.
30:33
SPEAKER_00: So you say, what do I do about this?
30:34
SPEAKER_00: Well, one thing you could do is what Hank did.
30:37
SPEAKER_00: You know, it's prayer.
30:38
SPEAKER_00: You could you could pray, Lord, help me to thank God it's money, to appreciate the blessing of work.
30:47
SPEAKER_00: Guys, I'll throw in something else.
30:48
SPEAKER_00: If you'd like to become a better worker wherever you are, or a better leader or whatever, I recommend you might consider coming.
30:55
SPEAKER_00: We changed men's fraternity, moved it to Thursday morning.
30:58
SPEAKER_00: It's gonna be a breakfast starting not this Thursday, the following, calling it Men of Success.
31:03
SPEAKER_00: We're not gonna use somebody else's book.
31:05
SPEAKER_00: I'm going, Derek and I are going to share.
31:10
SPEAKER_00: I'm a fan, frankly, of leadership books, business success books, uh, self-improvement books, and I'm gonna take, you know, we're gonna take about 10 bestsellers.
31:19
SPEAKER_00: Don't read them ahead of time.
31:20
SPEAKER_00: We'll just summarize them and we'll discuss them, such as the four disciplines of execution, how full is your bucket, Covey's uh, this is the only one that's not up to date.
31:28
SPEAKER_00: Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, How the Mighty Fall by Jim Collins, Lindcioni's the Ideal Team Player, Mindset by Carol Dweck, Halftime, Bob Duford, Principal of the Path Analystation.
31:38
SPEAKER_00: So anyway, consider coming a week after next.
31:41
SPEAKER_00: If you would like to really fine-tune your leadership, your work, become more successful in that way.
31:48
SPEAKER_00: You you rarely can go, I think, to a business or leadership or self-improvement conference that really considers these things in light of the Bible.
31:58
SPEAKER_00: And that's what we'll do when we have our discussion.
32:01
SPEAKER_00: One more story, and then we'll take the Lord's table.
32:04
SPEAKER_00: This is a story that dates from several hundred years ago.
32:06
SPEAKER_00: It's an example of a guy who I think is an incredible model of what we used to call secular work, what some people call secular work, how it's spiritual.
32:15
SPEAKER_00: His name is William.
32:16
SPEAKER_00: His name is William Wilberforce.
32:18
SPEAKER_00: And he trusted Christ as his savior when he was 25 in 1785, about this during the time of the revolution of America, founding of America.
32:29
SPEAKER_00: And he was in politics already, and so he thought, well, I need to go into spiritual work.
32:35
SPEAKER_00: I ought to leave politics, go into the ministry.
32:37
SPEAKER_00: People said, You need to go in the ministry.
32:38
SPEAKER_00: You're really smart.
32:39
SPEAKER_00: You ought to leave politics, go into the ministry, become a pastor, a reverend, whatever.
32:44
SPEAKER_00: And he was going to do it, and then a uh converted slave owner named John Newton, who wrote Amazing Grace, got hold of him and said, Don't, don't, don't, don't do that.
32:54
SPEAKER_00: God can use you in a mighty way, right there where you are, you know, in Parliament.
33:00
SPEAKER_00: And Wilberforce, uh, Newton knew this, Wilberforce fighting against slavery.
33:05
SPEAKER_00: And Wilberforce, over the next 20 years, became the Abe Lincoln of Great Britain in 1807.
33:11
SPEAKER_00: He he convinced Parliament to outlaw slavery.
33:14
SPEAKER_00: This is 50 years before our Civil War, to outlaw slavery.
33:19
SPEAKER_00: In his journal, in his journal, as he was going through this process, William Wilberforce, 1788, wrote these words.
33:28
SPEAKER_00: My walk is a public one.
33:32
SPEAKER_00: My business is in the world.
33:35
SPEAKER_00: And I must mix, and he meant by that, I must work, in the assemblies of men, or quit the post which Providence seems to have assigned me.
33:47
SPEAKER_00: A providence has assigned most of us to work in the world, to mix in the assemblies of men, to do what some people would call secular work, but which is actually full-time Christian work.
34:03
SPEAKER_00: Thank God for the opportunity and work heartily as to the Lord and not to men.
34:10
SPEAKER_00: Now let's pray and celebrate the Lord's table.
34:13
SPEAKER_00: Heavenly Father, as we come to the table, we recognize that we are celebrating something that illustrates this message, that this is a Jesus that we're looking at, who came down in flesh, and that a tree was chopped down and turned into a rugged cross, and there were long Roman nails, and there was blood and sweat that trickled down, and it was so earthy and it was so human.
34:36
SPEAKER_00: It was so, so secular, but at the same time, the most spiritual thing ever happened.
34:42
SPEAKER_00: And in this moment, we look to the cross, we'll eat the bread and think of his body.
34:50
SPEAKER_00: We'll drink the cup and think of his blood shed for us so that we might forever live in heaven.
34:59
SPEAKER_00: Body, soul, spirit.
35:02
SPEAKER_00: In Jesus' name.
35:04
SPEAKER_00: Amen.