Hi, welcome to Redeem the Commute. I’m Ryan, your host of The Daily Challenges and today is Tuesday, so it’s the day we take the topic we’ve explored this week and we try to see what the Bible has to say about. Yesterday I talked about how following Jesus means a reset to everything in life, including our attitudes around our work. That can be hard because work is such an overwhelming aspect of our lives. It can drive so much of what we do and say in life. We spend most of our waking time working. Even if it’s unpaid work, it’s still work that we find ourselves engaged in day to day. We need a sense of how do followers of Jesus see work a little differently than others. It’s going to come from an unlikely source. It comes from a letter than Paul wrote to Christians in a city called Colosse. It’s called the letter to the Colossians and as part of that letter, directly addressed what he called bond servants.
Here’s what he had to say. Bond servants, obey in everything those who are your earthly masters, not by way of eye service, as people pleasers, but with sincerity of heart, hearing the Lord. 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. For the wrongdoer will be paid back for the wrong he has done and there is no partiality. Masters, treat your bond servants justly and fairly, knowing that you also have a master in heaven. Well, bond servants isn’t really a term we use very much today. For us, it’s probably analogous to employees, but back then, bond servants were sort of a blend of what we would know as employees and what we would call slaves today. It’s hard because slavery has changed over the centuries.
When we think of slavery in our culture, we generally think of North American slavery and the horrors and oppression of that mode of slavery. No kind of slavery is all right, but we just want to understand a little bit of the culture that Paul was writing to. It was a culture where slavery was very much a reality. It may have been an unquestioned reality for people. It was just the way of the world worked. What Paul does is he undermines a little bit. He subverts it. You can hear him speaking directly to the bond servants, the slaves. Those who, for one reason or another, found themselves wholly owned by someone else. What he does is he tells them they are not wholly owned, even though that’s what it may say on paper, even though that’s what people may assume in their culture.
Those who happen to be followers of Jesus are being told directly by one of Jesus’ first followers, one of his apostles, that they are not wholly owned by their earthly masters. He distinguishes between the earthly masters and their Heavenly Master. They are actually wholly owned by their Creator, by God. Although in this world, the kingdom of this world, there maybe people who think they wholly own other human beings, they are not. Can you imagine the freedom that comes from knowing you are not wholly owned when everybody you know thinks you are and when the legal system thinks you are wholly owned by someone else. Imagine the freedom that that gives to someone in a system that oppresses them, knowing that they are free.
Now, unfortunately, this passage and others like it, have been used to condone horrific abusive forms of slavery like those we’ve seen in North America in the last few centuries. Those need to be condemned and they have been condemned by Christians. Unfortunately, there are those who have found in the Bible words that they could twist and use to justify terrible crimes. That’s happened. It continues to happen and Christians need to continue to read the Bible as a whole to wrestle with God’s words in the whole of the Bible about the dignity of human beings and speak out when that kind of oppression happens at all and especially when it’s justified using the words of the Bible twisted for people’s selfish gain. One of the biggest hints that this passage can’t really be used to condone slavery where people are wholly owned and abused and oppressed is that Paul addresses his passage to the bond servants and to the slave owners. What he wants the slave owners to know is that they need to remember the dignity in every human being. That those who work for them are not wholly owned by them. Those slave owners will have to answer to God some day because He is the one who created us all and who owns everything on this earth including the atoms that we were put together with. They are all His and although we have care of it for a time, what we could call stewardship, like an investment advisor takes care of somebody’s money, we take care of God’s creation.
We need to remember that we are not our own and we are especially not in any position to own and control and abuse another human being. He wants both slave owners and the bond servants to have the same attitude of seeking out first the kingdom of God where all humans have equal dignity, where all humans are equal in the sight of God, where all humans have a responsibility to care for one another, to be generous with one another. There is a lot of great material in this passage, obviously, and it’s culturally hard for us to catch because it does speak about bond servants and slave owners and that’s hard for us to understand today. Tomorrow we’re going to try to enlighten what this has to do with our modern working life. In the meantime, I want you to try to think about that. Your question for today, which I hope you’ll share with others, maybe start a little discussion group, is this, what might this say to employees today? Is there any way that we, today, can be owned by our work?
Well, I hope you have a great discussion. This one is certainly a topic that can get people going, so I really hope you do share this with somebody. Remember, we’re reading the Bible in sync as a community. If you’ve been following us for a little while, make sure you’re reading our daily Bible passage as well. It’s just another way that our community tries to stay in sync even though we’re not meeting together in person very often. We can continue learning to follow Jesus as one community in scattered mode so our gathered mode is all the more exciting when it happens. Have a great day. I will see you tomorrow.
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Hi, welcome to Redeem the Commute. I'm Ryan your host of the daily challenges and today is Wednesday, so it's the day we see how the bible's take challenges and transforms our thinking about a topic.
This week we've been talking about compassion and service to others and how following Jesus resets our view of that. We saw yesterday how Jesus resets our view of compassion as a risky thing that involves people who we consider to be risks and instead seems them as opportunities to serve Jesus.
Opportunities to instead do our job by helping and serving others. That it's simply part of whom we are meant to be as followers of Jesus. It's not something we do to earn an award, it's not something we do to avoid punishment, it's something we do to love and serve Jesus.
Of course loving and service Jesus has its rewards, and its risks when we avoid them. The primary thing is following Jesus and one of the many aspects of that is that that leads us to serve and bless others.
The bible talks about many other reasons to serve and care for others. It talks about them in a number of dimensions with a number of different words but the one word that I think comes out most is love. The reason to serve others is because they are loved by God.
If we're trying to truly know and follow him then they're our people to love as well. Here's how Paul, who wrote much of the New Testament, described the connection between serving others and love.
"If I give away all I have and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing."
Maybe you've heard that at weddings before but that's really not the point. The point Paul was trying to make was that his faith what it means to follow Jesus isn't just a mechanistic thing where we have to do certain things and not do others.
Sell all your possessions and follow Him. That's part of it but it's not a mechanistic thing where if "A" then "B." It's meant to be under grouped by love. If we're going to sell everything and feed others with it that has to come from a place of love for Jesus. Love for Jesus is people that He loves. Rather than us trying to gain something for ourselves.
This is like what we talked about on Monday. That we can follow Jesus, we can serve others for all the wrong reasons if we're trying to do it for selfish gain. Compassion has to be self-less. Self-giving sacrifice.
There are some other reasons the bible says we can care for others and one is for unity within the Christian family. We've talked a lot in our daily challenges about the church becoming like family and it's important to see that there's an obligation to look after members of our family.
Here's how Paul put it in his letter to the Corinthians. "There should be no division in the body, but that the members should have the same care for one another. And if one member suffers, all the members suffer with it; if one member is honored all the members rejoice with it.”
Showing compassion and care for others within the Christian family is part of us showing our unity as a family. That this unity we speak of isn't just a theoretical or a nice, theological idea, but it's something that actually has legs.
The bible also talks about us showing compassion because of God's compassion. Put on then, as God's chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassionate hearts, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience.
That came from Paul's letter to the Collisions where he was reflecting on how we have been so loved that we can show love to others. That we can clothe ourselves in some ways in God's clothes. We want to look more and more like God by showing compassion like compassion was shown to us.
By showing kindness like compassion and kindness was shown to us. We can see all these characteristics we’re meant to show to others are simply characteristics that God has shown to us. We are reflecting God's glory into the world. God's love and compassion into the world when we engage in compassionate service ourselves.
We're also called to show compassion and service because it's God's law. Because it's commanded to us. In Paul's letter to the Galatians he said: "Bear one another’s burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ."
When Christ was asked about the law he distilled it down to its two main points; love God and love neighbor, and you can see how compassionate loving service to our neighbor fulfills God's law.
We can also see in the bible how we're to serve and care for others not to gain karma for ourselves but rather because we can identify in others something of ourselves.
We can see serving others is how we would want to be served. Here's what Jesus said in the Book of Matthew. "So whatever you wish that others would do, do also to them, for this is the law and the prophets.”
Jesus was again summarizing the importance of loving neighbor as a distillation of the law and the prophets. He was also making a very important connection. That we don't serve others in order to be served ourselves.
We're not trying to gain some reward. We're not expecting what goes around comes around like karma would say but rather out of grace we have been loved by God and so we can show love to others.
God has given us mercy and through his grace and so we can show mercy to others and care for their very real needs in this world.
Finally we can see that we are sent out into the world to show compassion. Followers of Jesus are not meant to stay cloistered together as an inward-looking institution. Rather we're meant to be outward-looking, outward-serving. Caring for others in the world around us. You can see this in how Jesus sent out his followers into what he called the harassed.
"When He saw the crowds, He had compassion for them, because they were harassed and helpless like sheep without a shepherd. Then He said to His disciples, "The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few; therefore pray earnestly to the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into His harvest."
Jesus was speaking to his disciples, those who would follow Him and essentially telling them it was now their job to do this work in this world. To be their harvesters. Be his laborers. Following Jesus makes compassionate service to others our job like we've been talking about all week.
Tomorrow we're going to try to put this into action in our lives but in the meantime I've got a question for you to think about.
Question: What pattern do you see emerging in all of these passages from the bible, that we've read? What ties them all together?
Don't do this alone it's something great to discuss with a group. Find a group of people you can do our daily challenges with where you watch the videos together or whenever you have the opportunity, and when you meet together you can discuss what you’ve been learning, how it’s challenging you and how you're finding joy in life.
Have a great one. 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.
