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.
Read the Bible in Sync Today
Loading Content...
Share a Link to this Message
The link has been copied to your clipboard; paste it anywhere you would like to share it.
Hi! Welcome to Redeem the Commute. I'm Ryan, your host for to the daily challenge. Today is Thursday, it's a day we try to live out what we've been learning all week. This week, as part of our series on Reset, we've been looking how following Jesus resets our views of nature, the natural world around us. We've already explored that in the bible.
We seen how God's plan for the world, for the kingdom God is not just some spiritual idea, but actually something very much connected with the physical, natural world that we live in. Our natural bodies are even part of God's plan. And so, God's creation is not something disposable that we're all going to fly away from and see burned up, but something God has a plan for. God said it was good. God has a plan for it to be good in his kingdom as well.
So what does that mean for us as followers of Jesus? How do we actually try to live out some respect for God's creation, for God's masterpiece, this work of art that we live in and are part of? This might seem like a natural given part of our world, well surely, the world is getting more concerned with the environment. We have recycling now, we have compost and all that.
But don't just assume that the natural structures in our world and governments are going to take care of following Jesus for us in any respect. For example, I just would have assumed that younger generations were that much more concerned with the environment. We learned about it in school and so on, but I actually just saw a statistic this week that said millennials, the generation that is coming of age and entering the workforce now are significantly less concerned with the environment than gen X'ers who went before them.
We can't just assume that with new generations, growing with an awareness of global warming and things like that, we're always going to see progress and improvement. As followers of Jesus, we need to take responsibility. If we truly believe this is God's creative work of art, something to be respected and cared for, part of God's plan for his kingdom than we as followers of Jesus need to be at the forefront of taking care of it.
I wish I could just give you a hard and fast set of rules of what to do to take care of the environment, to do just enough for God to love you and give you good things. But, we here at Redeem the Commute are always concerned with how we see God's grace working in the world. We start with God's love, God's plan to redeem us and adopt us into his family and then having been adopted into that family. That's when Jesus resets our views of nature and the environment.
This is not just a simple set of rules that you have to follow to earn God's love, rather this is a question saying how much can I care for God's creation to show God how thankful I am for what he has given me, for his redemption of me and my body and my world around me. For he's adopting me back into his family. This is a question of how much we can do in order to thank God.
Some people have suggested that for followers of Jesus, there aren't just three R's, reduce, reuse and recycle, but that we should have five R's. The five R's would begin with reverence for seeing that God's creation is his work of art, something to be revered and respected and honored.
Just like if you went to a friend's showing at an art studio. You probably wouldn't walk around and say, "Oh this is terrible stuff." But you'd want to respect the work that they'd put in to that and your friendship with them would mean that you'd want to see their art in the best possibly light and care for it that you wouldn't be going and destroying them. Same way as we walk around this natural world, we want to show reverence for it. That means teaching our children not to liter and throw things on the ground, to try to have the least impact possible.
There's a rule that I follow in camping. To leave nothing but footsteps and take nothing but photographs. It's actually not a bad rule for any of us walking through this life. Try to leave behind as little waste as possible and take away as little as possible from its natural environment. It's a way to show reverence for God's creation.
The secondary would be reducing. Reducing how much we consume and use. There are all sorts of practical ways to do that. You know what, sometimes, it's a little less convenient but it's important that we do. So we're not needlessly using resources we could find elsewhere.
For example, I needed a hose one day that I could attach to my hot water heater and just run to the drain in the ground. I didn't need to go and buy a whole new hose for that. It would be a terrible waste because I'd be cutting it anyway. And so what I did is I just kind of watched and waited for a neighbor to throw a hose, then I went and asked and took their old hose they didn't need. It was all kinked up, but you know what? I could get the three to four feet that I needed in that hose and not worry about the kinks later on.
I was able to reduce our family's consumption. I was able to do the job I needed to do which actually had its own benefits of protecting our basement and I was able to do it without buying new things, having them shipped half way around the world and so on.
The third R is to reuse, to take what we've got and keep using it. I keep a number of things around scraps just in case they're going to come in handy at some point and it's amazing to use as we find for things that we thought were garbage. So try to keep what you can around. I don't want you to clutter up your house, but try to reuse things that you think might not be necessary anymore.
The fourth R would be to recycle and that's something that our culture is actually pretty good at. We have lots of opportunities to recycle. It just takes a little time and effort to divide things up properly make sure that you're putting things in the right place so they can be recycled and turned on to other products.
The fifth R is to repair what we've got. Sometimes, I know in our culture, it's easier to just replace something. It's actually pretty encouraged in our culture. Lots of things aren't made to last and sometimes it cost a little more money to repair something.
For example, we've got a vacuum cleaner that I could have probably replaced for the same amount of money it's going to cost to buy the replacement parts to keep it going in the future, but I can't bear the thought of throwing the whole thing away. It would just seem like such a waste of plastic and electronics. It wouldn't be right.
Even though it might cost me more money in the end to keep replacing parts and keep this thing going, for now it's seems more appropriate to repair. That's the fifth R, to repair what we've got and keep it going for the future. It means less waste, less garbage and less buying of new things. Sometimes it will even save you money. My example, not so much.
I recognize that this kind of thing can be hard in a busy commuting lifestyle. Many of us don't feel we have a lot of extra margin in our lives, we don't have a lot of extra time to be repairing things and trying to reuse things. We're trying to keep our lives as simple as we can because they're so hectic in other areas.
However, I think this is an important part of what it means to follow Jesus is that we take God's creation, God's work of art seriously enough that it's worth our extra effort, little extra time in order to show that reverence to respect it by repairing and reusing and recycling and reusing whatever we can.
Challenge: Think through the five R's. Reverence, reduce, reuse, recycle, and repair. Think through those things and write down maybe in your phone, in the note section or on a piece of paper what you can do this week to start taking each of these five R's seriously. Just one little thing and then keep it going next week and next week and next week. Keep writing down a list of what you're going to do this week, what will you repair, what will you reuse, what will you recycle.
Just to help us in a structured way, show that reverence for God's creation, for God's work art, playing out in all different areas of our lives. At work, at home and in between. Maybe you can discuss with a group that you're meeting with regularly to do our challenges, what those five R's are going to look like this week.
Don't forget we're reading the bible in sync as a community as well. You'll find today's reading in the upper website. Have a great discussion. I will see you tomorrow.
