Hi, welcome to redeem the Commute. I’m Ryan, your host for the daily challenges. These daily challenges are meant to help you explore what it means to follow Jesus even in the midst of a busy commuting lifestyle. If you’ve never explored what it means to follow Jesus, I’d encourage you to check our Christianity 101 course first. It would be a great introduction to the things we try to put into practice in these daily challenges. Every week we follow a daily, weekly rhythm that helps us as a scattered community of people trying to follow Jesus in a busy lifestyle work together and learn together.
Every Monday we introduce the idea for the week. Every Tuesday we try to see where that idea is spoken about in the Bible. Every Wednesday, we see how the Bible’s take on the topic challenges and transforms our thinking. Thursdays, we try to apply it, put it into practice. Then Friday is a day for prayer and reflection on how the week has gone. Saturday we take a day of rest and then Sunday’s a day for community.
It’s especially important that followers of Jesus are gathering together regularly in community. That’s why we’re going to be starting a brand-new Christian community, a new church in Ajax this year. I’d love to hear from you if you’d like to be part of what we’re starting. If you’d like to be part of the team to get it off the ground or if you’re planning to be regularly attending our worship and community once it starts.
Right now, our challenges are following a series we call Reset. We’re looking at what it means to follow Jesus and how following Jesus resets every aspect of our lives. We saw first of all, how the language of born again leads us to this conclusion. Then, we’ve been looking in the subsequent weeks at how following Jesus impacts each area of life. We’ve talked about time; we’ve talked about money, talked about our goals. This week going to talk about how following Jesus resets our attitudes about work. Work is such an important thing to talk about. Most of us spend more time at work than we do sleeping. Takes up so much of our day. It drives how we organize ourselves, what time we get up in the morning, what time we get home, what kind of childcare the kids are in or not. It determines our income and how we spend our money as a result.
Our work has a lot to do with how our lives are planned and organized. We talked through the series about how following Jesus resets everything. Our assumption needs to be that yes, following Jesus does reset our attitudes about work. It changes how we work. The question we really need to explore is how. What’s that actually mean to say Jesus resets our attitudes around work? Maybe you have some stories in mind that have you concerned. You know, I just met somebody recently who had just become a Christian, and they proudly told me that they had quit their job and were studying theology now.
I heard about somebody else, who joined a different religion altogether, and when they did they quit their job, a decent paying job and took a much lower paying job, simply so they could be working with a member of their religion. They weren’t allowed to associate with people of other religions anymore. That put up some red flags, obviously. Maybe those kinds of stories concern you too. You think it means following Jesus always leads to quitting your job. Maybe you have to become a monk or something like that, or you have to join the priesthood.
I heard one interesting quote from Friedrich Buechner. “The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet. I believe the fruit of such a calling is joy.” Now that kind of attitude towards our work probably doesn’t sound so bad. We can’t completely withdraw from the world, but all becoming monks are quitting a job that puts us in contact with people of different religions. We wouldn’t be able to meet the world’s deep needs if we all withdrew from the world as followers of Jesus. Following Jesus also isn’t about working to the bone with no joy. There’s meant to be a deep joy found in serving the deep needs of the world.
I know one friend who found himself so overwhelmed by his work and his career, so overwhelmed by the sense that he needed to be moving upwards, up the corporate ladder that he eventually found it was crushing him, and it was crushing his family. It was crushing his marriage. He left that job. After a period of uncertainty, a challenging time, found himself in work that was much more fulfilling, where he found himself serving others, caring for others, where he was finding deep joy in meeting the world’s deep needs. He was still using some of the same skills he learned from his education and in the early years of his career, but he found that it wasn’t joyless and it wasn’t disconnected from the world anymore. He was able to be a follower of Jesus in his work.
Sometimes we have to pause and reassess our ideas of what upward or downward mobility mean. Yes, my friend might be making less money than he did before. Yes, he put a career on hold for a little while, but he firmly believes that had he continued down the path he was going it would have led to his destruction. Sometimes we think our choices before us are just a choice of whether I go upward or downward. We don’t realize that continuing to pursue upward mobility at all costs could be ultimately the source of our demise, can actually be a choice between having any work, anyway, to support ourselves or our family or nothing, if we find ourselves so physically, spiritually and emotionally broken as a result of having pursued all the wrong things in life.
Whether it’s money, power, prestige or something else, our work can lead us to a path of destruction if we have our sense of upward and downward mobility mixed up, we think upward mobility is just about making more money, having a higher position in this world, we’ve missed the point that there is far more to this world than what we see right now. There’s far more to this world than money and career. I’ve got a question for you to think about before we get into this a little bit more this week. Our question is, “Do you think Christians are meant to work differently from others?” How and why?
Just a reminder that we’re reading the Bible in sync as a community right now. Make sure you check our website or app to see what today’s Bible reading is. Even while were scattered, we can be gathering together virtually to read the Bible together, to grow and learn as followers of Jesus. Hope you have a great discussion with a group you’re hopefully working with. If you’re not, think about who you could share our challenges with. It’s a great opportunity to connect to the deeper level with some friends or colleagues. Have a great one. I’ll see you tomorrow.
Read the Bible in Sync Today
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Hi, welcome to Redeem the Commute. I'm Ryan your host of the Daily Challenges. Here we are in nature. And that's because this week we're studying how following Jesus resets our views of nature, the natural world around us.
And what did Jesus say directly about nature? Well not a lot. There's a time where he kind of admired the lilies of the field and the birds. Other times he calmed nature like calming a storm. He clearly had control over nature.
Jesus also withdrew to natural places when he needed a quiet moment of prayer. He clearly enjoyed the opportunity to have undistracted time with His Father. And nature was the place to do that.
It doesn't seem Jesus had anything against nature. There was a time He cursed a fig tree. But that was very much a symbolic act, showing how the people of Israel, the tree that they represented and the temple that was their connection to God were starting to wither away. And that their time was coming to an end. That was what he was showing with cursing the fig tree. It wasn't that he hated trees and thought they had no place in the natural world that He'd created.
So to really get a good sense of what Christian faith has to say about nature, we have to look to one of Jesus' first followers, one of the first church leaders, who was named Paul. When he wrote a letter to the church that was meeting in Rome, called the Letter to the Romans, here's what he had to say that's really instructive about the importance of the natural world and how it fits into the big story that we keep studying here at Redeem the Commute.
"For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us. For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God. For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now. And not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies."
Well there's a tendency in our modern world and in some world religions to really think of nature as being perfect. To think that nature is this perfect and uncorrupted, innocent reality. And that we humans are a bit of a virus or a parasite within it. I think what Paul makes clear, though, in this Letter to the Romans is that there is something wrong with the natural world around us. It's not as it should be. And that's not just a functional thing where we have simply abused it and done nothing else wrong. He says it's very much connected to human corruption and rebellion against God. That our human corruption and rebellion against God has led to the corruption of nature and that this wasn't the fault of nature itself. He uses a lot of really passive language there, to say that nature was subjected to something. And it became futile. He's using some very submissive language there to say this happened to nature.
And it happened to nature because of the human rebellion against God, but it started with a man named Adam. The first man, Adam, rebelled against God. And this had an impact, not just on his own life, but on all of humanity to follow and then on all of creation around him. There's something wrong with us and now there's something wrong with the world too.
But Paul also makes clear that creation is waiting for something and so is humanity. We're waiting for redemption. Redemption is a great word. That's why we named our church Redeemer Church and our main outreach Redeem the Commute. We love the word redeem. Because redeem suggests that there's great value in something that's not being realized right now. I like to think of a gift card. It's a piece of plastic that holds within it some great value. You could have a $200 gift card contained within a piece of plastic. And what you have to do is you have to go to the store in order to redeem its value, in order to release all that value. In order to release all that value, in order to turn it into a DVD player or a computer, or whatever it is. You have to release all that pent up potential.
In the same way we humans were created for something amazing and wonderful, as part of an amazing and wonderful creation. God had great plans for us. God created us for a relationship with Him, created us for a relationship with one another and with the natural world around us. There is huge and wonderful potential in the human race. And yet because of our rebellion against God, our sin, a lot of that potential is not being realized right now. It's all locked up and needs to be redeemed. And that's why Paul says we humans and the natural world with us are waiting to be redeemed. When humans are redeemed, he says we'll be the sons of God. It'll be clear that we were created to be the children of God. And even though we've rebelled against God and pushed ourselves out of His life, He still wants to adopt us back into His family.
Creation itself, the natural world around us, the animals, the plants, the structure of the world itself, Paul says is also waiting for our redemption so it too can be redeemed.
We humans got ourselves into this mess by rebelling against God using our free will to push Him out of our lives. And so this is our problem to fix. And that's why since a first Adam, a first man, broke the world, a second Adam, a second man, who represents all of humanity, needs to fix it. And that's what God has done in coming to earth as Jesus Christ. What Adam broke, Jesus fixed.
There's great hope in this, and it's not just a spiritual kind of idea about what might happen in the future somewhere else. What Paul is doing is very much rooting the reality of our sin and our redemption that needs to follow in this physical world. This isn't just a spiritual thing that, oh, someday our hearts are going to change and that's it. No, he says our hearts will change and our whole body will change and the world around us will change when we are redeemed by Jesus Christ.
This is very much connected: the physical world, the spiritual world. There is no disconnect. The Kingdom of Heaven isn't some place far off in the clouds disconnected from the natural world here. The natural world isn't something to be hated or thrown away or disposed. It's very much connected to God's plan for the world, for God's plan called the Kingdom of God, or the Kingdom of Heaven. And followers of Jesus, having been reset by Jesus Christ, are invited to start practicing that now, to start practicing the Kingdom of Heaven here on earth. As Jesus said, "as it is in heaven." So we're supposed to practice a little bit of heaven right here in the physical world. What does that look like? Well, we'll see later this week what that might look like in practice.
And in the meantime I've got a question for you to think about and hopefully discuss with others who you know are also watching these videos every day. Or maybe you can invite some friends to do that as well, to start watching the videos on the same days as you. And when you do come together and have a spare moment, you can discuss what you've been learning.
Question: What about this passage gives you hope? Have you ever seen the natural world groaning? Does this give you hope that someday that groaning ends?
Have a great discussion. I'll see you tomorrow.
When our computers get bogged down and unmanageable, we know to hit a reset button to simply start over. Wouldn't a reset button be great in life? We know it would be complicated, with all our responsibilities and routines to consider, but imagine the freedom and refreshment of a new start in life! What would you do differently? What would you pay more attention to, and what would you ignore? How would you avoid getting bogged down and broken again?
The great news is, in coming to earth as Jesus Christ, God has begun to "reset" our universe, our world, and even us. We're invited to start over with him, in what he calls his kingdom. We're invited to start a new life with a clean slate.
What gets wiped clean, and lived differently, when God resets our lives? We'll explore how God resets these key areas of our lives:
Reset: Goals
Reset: Time
Reset: Money
Reset: Work
Reset: Body & Food
Reset: Sex & Marriage
Reset: Family
Reset: Compassion
Reset: Nature
Reset: Society
Reset: Death
Join us for the next several weeks, and invite God to reset your life.
