Serving the Lord in Everyday Life
“Whatever you do, work heartily, as for the Lord and not for men, knowing that from the Lord you will receive the inheritance as your reward. You are serving the Lord Christ.”
– Colossians 3:23, 24
FROM THE STUDY
Dear friends,
There is a woman here in town who has driven the same route to work for years now. She gets to work and clocks in. Turn the computer on. Deal with patients canceling their appointments and office workers calling in “sick”. Maybe nobody will write her autobiography, at least not yet. She has more important concerns. She reads everywhere in Scripture we are to “Serve the Lord” and wants to know exactly how she can serve the Lord daily, in everyday life. Ask her what she does to serve the Lord and she will tell you she’s not sure. She wants specifics. This is one of the most important questions a Christian can ask about living the Christian life in a way that glorifies and honors our Lord and benefits others as well. We’re talking about what it means to be a Christian moment by moment in real life. It’s a big question.
The Apostle Paul, through the guidance and inspiration of the Holy Spirit, penned a verse just for her, and me, and you too!
“Whatever you do, work heartily, as for the Lord and not for men.” (Colossians 3:23).
Think about that for a moment. Paul is not writing here to preachers, or to folks with so much time on their hands that they can attempt great things for God. No. He is writing to household slaves, to people whose whole day was somebody else’s business, and he tells them their work is worship and service to the Lord (v.24).
“Whatever you do.” Not in a few minutes carved off at the close of the day, when work is behind you and you can finally turn your attention to God to do something ‘Christian’. It’s your work itself, brethren. Whether it’s at the office, over a retail counter, raising cattle, folding laundry, or changing that diaper. It just doesn’t matter. Paul draws no line between a sacred hour and a common one, because for the Christian there is no such line drawn. “And work heartily”, he says. The Greek word that is translated from means from the soul. Not with gritted teeth or the paycheck alone, not just to be seen and admired, but from the soul, as a thing you actually offer up to God. In Ephesians 6:7, Paul adds ‘with good will’ as an explanation of ‘heartily’. In other words, with a good disposition.
“As for the Lord and not for men.” Now take note here. This is the sentence that changes everything for us. The slave had a master he could see, standing over him, watching, and Paul reaches right past that master to a greater One. You have a Master the eye cannot see, and he is the One you are truly serving when you sit at the workplace keyboard, scrub the pot, fold laundry, keep the books honest. Whatever again. “From the Lord you will receive the inheritance as your reward. You are serving the Lord Christ” (Colossians 3:24). A servant, literally a slave, told he has an inheritance. And Christian, that is what you are! A slave to Christ Jesus, told his mopping is service rendered to the Son of God. And once you have seen it in your work you begin to see it everywhere, until Paul widens the whole thing out to the smallest, most basic movements a body can make. “So, whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God.” (1 Corinthians 10:31). Eating. Drinking. Great day in the morning! That, my friends, are plainest business of any given Saturday. There is no corner of an ordinary life too small for the glory of God to fill it. There is no menial task, Christian, that is not service unto the Lord. You do not have to leave your job, or the laundry room, to serve him. You just have to do the next plain, ordinary thing that God has given you to do, and do it unto him.
FROM THE SHELF
There’s a book available on this important subject. It was written by Gene Veith and he has written about the plainest book on it that I know about: God at Work: Your Christian Vocation in All of Life (Crossway). He recovers a doctrine the Reformers loved and most of us have’nt known about or quietly misplaced, that God feeds, clothes, governs and interacts with His creation, the whole world, through the ordinary work of ordinary hands. Luther put it with a farmyard bluntness that Veith is fond of quoting:
God himself will milk the cows through him whose vocation that is.
Your calling, whatever it might be, is the mask, so to speak, that God wears to love your neighbor through you. It is a short book, and it just might change the way you drive to work next Monday.
A WORD FROM JOEL
The thing is that we don’t need to wait for a holier opportunity to come along before we begin to serve God. It’s already here, every single day. The question was never whether your work is important enough to offer up to Adonai as a service. The question is whether you will offer it to Him.
When morning comes and the alarm goes off, remind yourself, first thing, that you are in the presence of the Lord God who redeemed you. Give thanks. Say it plainly to the Lord before your feet touch the floor: The day too is yours. Then go and do the next ordinary thing heartily, as unto him. He is not waiting for you to make a big move, off in some holier place. He is with you wherever you are, wherever you work, glad to receive the smallest thing done in his name. Now, let’s get at it!
Yours in Christ,
Joel
