Junk Drawer Jesus - The I.D. Badge (Genesis 2:8-17)

The Problem of Monday Morning

When I say the words “Monday morning”, how do you feel? Monday mornings mean the end of the fun, right? Back to the mundane. Monday mornings are loaded with so much emotional grind, Sunday night becomes it own time for anxiety. For many of us, Monday represents our worldview. The job is mundane. The job is a necessary evil. The job is considered the antithesis of play. And so we get to Sunday night, and we wonder “where the weekend” went, and we wonder “where the weekend went” because we’ve spent all weekend avoiding whatever it is that awaits us on Monday morning. There is nothing to look forward to.

Anti-mundane: The Bee Movie

This feeling that jobs are mundane necessary evils has been captured by many Hollywood movies and books. Dissatisfaction with mundane jobs is everywhere. In the Bee Movie, Barry B. Benson is told by a company recruiter:

“Most bee jobs are small ones. But bees know that every small job, if it's done well, means a lot. But choose carefully because you'll stay in the job that you pick for the rest of your life.”

Barry is discontent. He dreams of being a pollen jock and the rest of the movie follows his adventures not doing the mundane job of a bee. Mundane is viewed as the enemy, something to be avoided.

Dolly Parton had a #1 hit in the early 80s that sounded a lot like the Bee Movie:

“working nine to five… putting money in the rich man’s wallet. Never getting credit. Always dreaming of doing something else.”

The I.D. Badge

That brings us to the latest item in our spiritual junk drawer: the I.D. Badge. I’ve got quite a few former I.D. Badges laying around. Some of your are using yours all the time. Some of you have multiple badges. But that badge is a big part of life. Some of you dread that badge. Some of you are hoping to turn in that badge for something else. But just like everything else we’ve talked about in our spiritual junk drawer, there are things about those ID badges we’ve come to accept as true, but are not found in the Bible.

This morning we’re going to be right up front with where we’re going.

You are perfectly positioned. God has you right where you are supposed to be.

That flies in the face of a lot of what we’re told about our jobs and vocation. Because we’re told often that God has a perfect plan for our lives. We need to find that plan. AND… if we don’t obey, he’ll never show us his plan. How many of you have heard that?

But the truth is: wherever you’re at right now, is exactly where God wants you to be.

But we don’t believe that, for many reasons. Life is hard. The grass is greener somewhere else. This isn’t to say that God doesn’t use discontent with what we’re doing to show us new things and new opportunities. But even then, wherever we’re at is where God has placed us.

I don’t know how many conversations I’ve had with people who say, because of job loss or a potential job transition or waiting for the right door to open… “my life is in limbo”. There’s no such thing as limbo in God’s economy. Whatever your station in life at the moment, that’s where God has perfectly positioned you for the Gospel’s sake.

Teenage Anxiety

This kind of thinking has affected Gen Y and Gen Z in pretty severe ways. Saw another news story this past week.. the numbers suggest that young adults believe the future is bleak. Many believe the so-called American dream is out of reach.

This coincides with all the anxiety in the COVID generation. Pew Research has done numerous studies of the anxious generation. 95% of teenagers believe that “finding a job they love” is very important to finding meaning as an adult. That 95% is higher than things like “kindness to others,” “starting a family,” and “having a vibrant faith.” You want to have a meaningful life? You want to make the most of your education and your goals? Well then, make sure you have a job you love. It’s more important than marriage, more important than religion.

Work becomes our identity

It’s not just the young generation. We spend a lot of time working. It’s easy to begin to believe that work is the identity. And in fact, you see it and hear it all the time in pop culture: you are what you do.

Work becomes our religion

And when work becomes the identity, it becomes our object of worship.

We sacrifice our best years to it

We offer ourselves to it hoping it will bless us with all of our dreams

The god is never satisfied

We were made to work

How do we begin to address the ID badge in the spiritual junk drawer? We’re going to try to keep this real simple this morning. We read the account from creation in Genesis 2. God makes the world, God makes human beings, and then God makes a garden and he places the human beings in the garden… our first parents Adam and Eve. And they are given the task of keeping the garden and filling the earth with God’s image.

God works

But all through this account in Genesis 2, we see God working. In fact, God is doing all the work… 16 times there’s the phrase God made, God made, God placed, God formed, God took. We are supposed to see it clear as a bell God is working, and He is working on behalf of the humans. From the very beginning, work has its origins in God himself. Work is divine.

We work

But then we’re told this:

Genesis 2:15 “The Lord God took the man and placed him in the garden of Eden to work it and watch over it.”

God takes Adam and places him in a garden specifically created for God and humans to dwell together. And the humans have the responsibility of maintaining and expanding God’s dwelling place on earth. Just think about that for a minute. In the original design, the work of humanity was specifically tied to God’s presence, his home on earth. God created this world specifically to love human beings… spend time with them, loving them, giving them grace. That’s the context for the origins of vocation and work.

There’s a lot going on in this verse, but what we need to see this morning that the creatures were made in the image of God and God’s work sets the pattern for humans to work. All this happened before sin entered the world. Humans were hardwired to be working… so much so that there are also plenty of studies that indicate devastating emotional damage from long-term unemployment.

Work became hard

Work was not supposed to be a drudgery. Expanding God’s house to the ends of the earth was supposed to be a delight.. working in perfect communion with the creator in developing his home on earth. But that all changed when our first parents decided to do their own thing. Here’s what God told Adam after Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit in rebellion:

Genesis 3:17–19 And he said to the man, “Because you listened to your wife and ate from the tree about which I commanded you, ‘Do not eat from it’: The ground is cursed because of you. You will eat from it by means of painful labor all the days of your life. It will produce thorns and thistles for you, and you will eat the plants of the field. You will eat bread by the sweat of your brow until you return to the ground, since you were taken from it. For you are dust, and you will return to dust.”

Ever since then, work has been hard. And because we’re sinners, work, not the creator, is what we worship. It becomes our identity. It becomes our means of glorifying ourselves… pursuing all sorts of activities and desires aimed at our own purposes. Fortunately for us, Jesus redeemed work for us in His work for us on the cross.

Why do we work?

Work is a gift

This is where it begins to be hard for us to believe. We are so conditioned to believe that work is a necessary evil. Work is part of our vocation. All of us have vocations… we have vocation at home as a husband and father. We have our vocation at work, whatever it is we do.. nurse, teacher, administrator, accountant, entrepreneur.. and then all of us have vocation in the church, which I’ll get to in a second. Home, community, and church are the three spheres where all of us have been given vocation.

And all of it is a gift from God to the world. The ID badge becomes less of an identity the more we begin to see that the badge is a gift that God has given to us for the sake of others.

Work is for the neighbor

Which brings us to this. Work is for the neighbor. The second greatest commandment is love your neighbor as yourself. Our vocations at home, in the community, and in Christ’s kingdom are not for God… that’s critical to understand… not for God but for our neighbor.

That touches on another popular myth in our spiritual junk drawer. Some jobs are more spiritual than others. God is better served when Christians are doing Christianly things. I remember a conversation I had a few years ago… a friend of mine made the comment that he wished more teens would spend their summers serving Jesus at a Christian camp than wasting their summer at What-a-burger. The guy was shocked when I told him the teens at What-a-burger are serving Jesus just as much as the kids at the Christian camp. All work is spiritual. All work is God’s work.

Work is God’s work in the world

And that leads to this: Work is God’s work in the world. Again, that cuts against the grain of how we think. God uses our work to accomplish his purposes. Matt Popovits has a great line in his book on this:

“God delivers gifts to people through people.”

Where did the donuts in the welcome area come from? Yeah… somebody made them. So that you would be blessed. How do we have lights and power for our musical instruments this morning? Somebody somewhere is at a computer making sure all the numbers check our and no alarms are going off so that we can have power this morning. God’s gift to us this morning are those people. And the same thing can be said of every single vocation represented here this morning.

That is so hard for us to remember in the negative views of work. Dolly sings about her work lining the rich guy’s wallet. That may be the case for most of us in a capitalist world, but that’s not where we find meaning or lack thereof in our work. The meaning is found in whatever we are accomplishing for our neighbor… and we are doing so as God’s agents in the world.

Work is expanding God’s presence on earth

There’s one last thing. Remember how we said that Adam and Eve’s work in the garden was maintaining God’s dwelling place on earth and expanding that dwelling place all over the globe?

Jesus has an interesting comment about vocation we often miss, mostly because we’re too busy thinking about this statement in the context of missions and evangelism:

Matthew 4:18–19 Peter and Andrew were casting a net into the sea—for they were fishermen. “Follow me,” Jesus told them, “and I will make you fish for people.”

I will make you fish for people. That’s a vocation statement. No matter what our vocation in the home or community, all of us have this vocation in the church: Fishing for people. Jesus is constantly using us, where we live, learn, work, and play to connect people to himself. This is why the Table cannot be inwardly focused. Our bent is outward because we are constantly bringing people to Jesus. We are forgiven people reaching people who are desperate for the good news of forgiveness.

The ID badge. It’s not our identity. It’s God’s means to bless others through you. Which brings us back to this:

You are perfectly positioned. God has you right where you are supposed to be.

Let’s pray.

The Table

This is Jesus’ work for you. Work all starts with Jesus and His work is FOR YOU and FOR ME. Salvation, redemption, forgiveness… that’s Jesus at work for you on the cross and at this Table.

Benediction