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Mar 12, 2023

God’s Work & Ours

God’s Work & Ours

Passage: Ephesians 6:5-9

Speaker: Andrew Kerhoulas

Series: Song & Dance - The Gospel Melody that Moves in Ephesians

Keywords: obey, masters, fear and trembling, bondservants, no partiality, people-pleasers

What does God have to say about where we spend half of our lives? It turns out Sunday’s worship and Monday’s labor are inextricably linked. However, do we operate machinery, change diapers, and teach our students with a biblical view of work, where even the most menial work is infused with eternal significance? Because of Jesus we can take up his view of work and become the workers and bosses he intends for us to be.

Readings & Scripture

CENTRAL TEXT: Ephesians 6:5-9

Bondservants, obey your earthly masters with fear and trembling, with a sincere heart, as you would Christ, 6 not by the way of eye-service, as people-pleasers, but as bondservants of Christ, doing the will of God from the heart, 7 rendering service with a good will as to the Lord and not to man, 8 knowing that whatever good anyone does, this he will receive back from the Lord, whether he is a bondservant or is free. 9 Masters, do the same to them, and stop your threatening, knowing that he who is both their Master and yours is in heaven, and that there is no partiality with him.

RELATED SCRIPTURES:

  • Genesis 1:26-28; 2:15
  • 1 Samuel 16:7
  • 2 Chronicles 19:7
  • Ecclesiastes 2:18-26
  • Romans 2:11
  • Colossians 3:22-25
  • 1 Peter 2:18

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS:

  1. Let’s take a trip down memory lane, shall we? What was your first job and how much did you earn per hour? Did you enjoy it? Why or why not? 
  2. Here’s a thought exercise: Why do you think (many) billionaires stay busy working? If finances were not an issue, what would you do when it comes to work? 
  3. Generation Z has coined the term “quiet quitting” to mean not going above and beyond at work. Judgmentalism aside, what do you think is underneath this viral trend? What’s going on at a heart level in young people as it relates to their work?
  4. Do you trend towards overwork or underwork? How does Paul’s teaching push against both extremes? 
  5. Read Genesis 3:16-19. Where have you felt the curse of sin in your place of work this week, whether it be at home with children, the factory, or the office? On the other hand, where have you seen God at work in your work lately? How does the gospel compel you to press through the thorns and thistles you experience as a worker and/or as a manager?
  6. Amy Sherman talks about how God’s work is meant to express itself in our work in three directions: up (characterized by a Godward orientation), in (marked by personal holiness and compassion for the hurting), and out (displayed through social responsibility and biblical justice). Try to name some implications of these three expressions of God’s work for your own work tomorrow.

Illustrations

InView Media Album: 03.12.2023

QUOTES: 

  • In war, work has found its soul—this time we must not lose it again in peace. Instead of crying out for an ‘enduring peace,’ we might do well to hope, not exactly for an enduring war, but for the carrying over into the strenuous times that lie ahead of that meaning which war has taught us to give to work. Dorothy Sayers 
  • Work is not, primarily, a thing one does to live, but the thing one lives to do. It is, or it should be, the full expression of the worker's faculties, the thing in which he finds spiritual, mental, and bodily satisfaction, and the medium in which he offers himself to God. Dorothy Sayers 
  • For this generation, the personal had become intertwined with the economic. Then the pandemic arrived. Though this disruption negatively affected knowledge workers of all ages, for Gen Z it delivered an extra sting. The depredations of pandemic-induced remote work—the crush of constant Zoom meetings, the sudden uptick of e-mail and chat, the loss of the redeeming social aspects of gathering in offices—stripped the last vestiges of joy from these jobs. For older employees, these conditions created a professional crisis.For Gen Z, which had so thoroughly mixed work and self, this suffocating grimness hit at a more personal level. It became clear to many that they needed to separate their personhood from their jobs. It is this transition that generates much of the angst exhibited in quiet-quitting videos. “Your worth as a person is not defined by your labor,” a defiant Zaid Khan concludes in the original quiet-quitting TikTok. To a millennial, with our work-as-a-means-to-an-end ethos, this statement sounds obvious and histrionic—like something you’d pronounce in a sophomore-year seminar. But, to Gen Z, declaring a distinction between the economic and the personal is a more radical act. . . Quiet quitting is not a life philosophy or policy proposal that needs logical scrutiny. It’s also not a political weapon to be wielded to prove how much more woke or conservative you are than everyone else. It’s both more incoherent and essential than all of that. Figuring out how work fits into a life well lived is hard, but it’s an evolution that has to happen. Quiet quitting is the messy starting gun of a new generation embarking on this challenge. The specifics of what a young engineer says in his TikTok video might annoy or confuse many of us, but it shouldn’t. The content here isn’t that important. What matters is that Generation Z is waking up to the fact that the unnatural melding of self and work induced by an adolescence lived within online spaces isn’t sustainable. They’re finally—thankfully—ready to ask what should come next.  Cal Newport
  • Hurry is not of the devil; hurry is the devil. Carl Jung
  • Long ago, J. R. R. Tolkien wrote a short story called "Leaf by Niggle," about a man whose "vocation" was to paint leaves. Various chores and inconveniences kept Niggle from finishing the painting to his satisfaction. But when he was called out of life, he discovered that the leaves he was painting were embedded in the forests, mountains, and streams of heaven. Tolkien's theory of vocation perfectly expresses Witherington's position: a worthy vocation contributes not only to our own financial well-being but to new creation. Scot McNight
  • If the devil can’t make you sin, he’ll make you busy. Corrie ten Boom

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