Encountering God in Work
Last week in Take it on Board, Charlie talked about the various amounts of time that he’d calculated he would be spending in various activities in his life. Now, I reckon that I’m going to spend about 83,200 hours of my life working, about 20% of my waking hours. That’s quite a big chunk and if I’m not Encountering God in my work that’s quite a big chunk of life God will be missing from.
And I don’t believe that God wants to be missing from 20% of our lives, I believe that God loves us and is interested and involved in everything we do, including our work and therefore we can Encounter God in our work.
For some of us that is a new idea
For some of us it is an idea we have heard before but we’ve forgotten it
For others it will be something we do experience but hunger to experience even more
As I speak I am aware that I don’t put all this into practice and that I fall well short of the vision that I hope to communicate, of how it could be. I’m also aware that my experience of work is limited, both in time and variety.
So the challenge to me and to us all, is to take the principles from this sermon and ask God if and how they could be applied to our working lives.
And I do believe that the principles I will outline apply to all types of work that God has called us to
Paid work
Volunteer Work
Home making
College Work
Before we look at how we can encounter God in work I’d like to spend a few moments looking at where work came from and why it exists. So the question is:
What is work?
I believe that the answer is that God created us and work together and for each other.
Could you look in your Bibles in the first book of the Bible, Genesis, at the story of creation. In Chapter 1 verse 26.
26 Then God said, "Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move along the ground."
Now God is a creative God who worked in creation and has been seen working all the way through human history. And we are created in God’s image, to have God’s characteristics, therefore we also have creativity and a drive to accomplish things, that is, to work
Genesis 2:15
15 The LORD God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it.
God created us and the earth in balance, for us to have an occupation and purpose in caring for it. This work was not to be a burden but a blessing.
Continuing in Genesis, we have the story of the Fall, how Adam and Eve disobeyed God and spoilt their relationship with God. But that was not the only thing spoilt by their action:
Genesis 3:17-19
17 To Adam he said, "Because you listened to your wife and ate from the tree about which I commanded you, 'You must not eat of it,' "Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat of it all the days of your life.
18 It will produce thorns and thistles for you, and you will eat the plants of the field.
19 By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return."
And we experience this today. For some of us our work is a burden all the time. For others it is a burden some of the time and a blessing some of the time. Monday goes well, Tuesday is a nightmare. And for some of us, we are dispirited by not having the work that we were created to be involved in.
Ecclesiastes 2:17
17 So I hated life, because the work that is done under the sun was grievous to me. All of it is meaningless, a chasing after the wind.
So, back to our question, what is work?
It was created as a blessing for us to allow us to supply our physical needs and fulfil our creativity.
Now it’s sometimes a blessing and sometimes a burden. And, in common with all things that have been spoilt, by our disobedience, we are called by God to work alongside in restoring it to it’s rightful state. And we can make a start by learning to encounter God in it.
Encountering God in the Place
Close your eyes, picture the place where you work. The desk, the production line, the ironing board.
Now think to yourself, God created this place and is here with me now.
How does that make you feel? Do you believe it? In Psalm 139, the psalmist describes the feeling he has about God:
7 Where can I go from your Spirit? Where can I flee from your presence?
8 If I go up to the heavens, you are there; if I make my bed in the depths, you are there.
9 If I rise on the wings of the dawn, if I settle on the far side of the sea,
10 even there your hand will guide me, your right hand will hold me fast.
God is at work everywhere, therefore God’s at work where you’re at work. We can Encounter God in the place that we work.*
It isn’t a case of us inviting God to join us at work, God has invited you to join in the work of restoring that place to be the place it should be.
However, if we are to Encounter God in the place we need to learn to recognise God.
That probably won’t happen without ground work on the relationship
We learn to recognise someone by spending time with them. For some people we’ve hardly met, some time ago, we might vaguely recognise a face but can’t remember the name or even where we remember them from. At the other end of the spectrum, people we know really well we only need to hear a couple of words or glimpse the back of the head and we know it’s them.
Long hair and Sarah story of recognition.
Now God won’t get a hair cut, God’s characteristics don’t change but what is said to us might . How is our vision when it comes to recognising God?
How do we get to know people? We spend time with them. If we are to encounter God in our work it is important to manage our time to spend time talking with God outside of work.
As well as being able to recognise God we also need to keep our eyes open. I know that I tend to compartmentalise my life, trying to keep work stuff separate from home stuff separate from church stuff. I need strategies to force me to break down the barriers between my work life and my Christ life.
If you’re the same, you might like to consider these:
Let phone ring three times and pray for conversation
Acknowledge God’s presence while waiting for Computer to boot up
Have an object in your workplace to remind you of God’s presence
God is work everywhere, therefore God’s at work where you’re at work
Encountering God in the People
In his book, “The Sacred Diary”, Adrian Plass describes a scene between the Christian diarist and a work colleague.
Excerpt.
What is clearly illustrated here is how we can end up feeling hypocritical and guilty in our relationships with the people we come across in our working lives. But, I believe that it doesn’t have to be this way. We have a God who forgives us and will be alongside us as we seek to mend relationships that are broken. And, as we move forward, we can Encounter God in the people* we work with and be encouraged by that encounter.
Now we saw earlier on that God created us all in God’s image. Now if this is true then it means that all the people we work with were also created in God’s image.
If this is true then we can Encounter God in the Godly characteristics of the people we work with.
It’s not just Christians that can teach us about God. One of the key stories in the Bible regarding faith came from someone who was not one of God’s people.
A Roman soldier, an officer, had a servant who was dying. He came to Jesus and asked him to heal the servant. Jesus said, I’ll come with you, but the officer said:
"Lord, I do not deserve to have you come under my roof. But just say the word, and my servant will be healed. When Jesus heard this, he was astonished and said to those following him, "I tell you the truth, I have not found anyone in Israel, among the people of God, with such great faith.
In my own life I have been taught a lot about love and friendship by key friends of mine who are not Christian. If we decide we cannot learn anything about God’s character from our non-Christian colleagues then we will not learn from it. But what an opportunity we might be missing. So let’s open our hearts to the possibility.
Having said that, in the same way that God’s created order was spoilt by human’s disobedience, God's image in them has been spoiled, as it has in us.
We have experienced God’s love in the work that Jesus did, on the cross, to enable that image to be renewed in us. We strive, each day, to become more like Jesus. One of the ways we do that is by joining the Holy Spirit in working out what Christ made possible, the restoration of God’s image in more and more people.
This means that we can Encounter God in the work God is doing in people’s lives.
Can we imagine what our workplaces would be like if we loved the people there as much as God does?
If we opened our eyes and ears, looked around us, listened, and had compassion as Jesus does.
Can we imagine the shock to our system and encouragement to our faith, and deepening of our relationship with God, were we to see, over time the change in someone we worked with as they came to know Jesus. I’d love to see it. I’m scared stiff of the steps I’d have to take to get there but I’d love to see it.
Encountering God in the Purpose
At the beginning of this sermon I said that, “God loves us and is interested and involved in everything we do,”. Part of this is that God has a specific purpose* for us, in everything, including our work.
Jeremiah 29:11
11 For I know the plans I have for you," declares the LORD, "plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.
We’ve seen that part of God’s purpose, for all of us, in our work is for us to join in the work of redeeming the place in which we work and restoring the image of God in the people we work with.
But I believe that God has a specific plan for each of us in how we should carry out that overall purpose and also that God has a unique purpose for each of us. And in realising that purpose and asking God about it we have to Encounter God.
If our work is more of a burden than a blessing to us, or if we don’t have work then that Encounter might be one of pain or anger on our part. We don’t have to be afraid of that or guilty about it, God loves us and doesn’t want us to hide our pain from Him.
I have to say that I don’t know what it feels like to be stuck in a work situation that is a burden. But Jesus does. He came to earth to do the work of the cross. And that was a burden, full of pain for him. He prayed in the Garden of Gethsamane, the night he was betrayed to death, “If it is possible, Father, let this not happen, yet not what I will, but what You will.“Jesus came to earth to heal our pain and left the Holy Spirit to be our comforter. So, if your experience of work is one of burden I’d encourage you to take it to Jesus and ask his healing and the Holy Spirit’s comfort.
As I draw towards a close, I have some questions that I’d like to leave with you:
Why do I do the work that I do?
Why am I doing the work that I do in the way that I do it?
Do I feel God has a purpose for me in this work?
Do I know what that purpose is?
How am I going to find out?
Am I acting on it?
They’re not questions that can necessarily be answered easily or quickly but I suggest that they are questions that we need to be asking ourselves and God regularly. You might like to use them as the basis of your discussions in Network groups this week, and commit to support each other in searching out the answers.
*So I end where I started, God loves us and is interested and involved in everything we do, including our work and therefore we can Encounter God in our work.
God is in the place that we work, but we have to learn to recognise God and choose to look out for God.
The people we work with were created in God’s image. The remains of the image can show us things about God and the work of restoring that image can show us even more.
God has a purpose for us in our work and in working that out we have to meet with God and talk it over.
Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for men, and if you are weary and burdened, go to Jesus, and he will give you rest.
And may the favour of the Lord our God rest upon us; establish the work of our hands for us-- yes, establish the work of our hands.
Amen