Hi, welcome to Redeem the Commute. I’m Ryan, your host for the Daily Challenge. Today is Thursday, we’ve been exploring a topic all week and today, we are going to try to apply it to our lives. This week we’ve been talking about how Jesus resets every area of our lives including how we see work. We’ve talked a few times this week about how work can take on a life of it’s own. Work can consume us. Work can drive us. Work can become our idol. It can become something we worship, something we elevate above all other things and that drives all other things in our lives. Work can become our god. Whenever we take something good in this world, we make it our ultimate good. It becomes our ultimately bad for us. That’s a definition of sin.
Back in our series that we did this past summer on work and rest, we explored what it looks like to work well as a follower of Jesus and we saw four ways to approach work as a follower of Jesus today. Way to apply what we learned from Colossians on Tuesday about work and working continuously, working for God, working well and try to apply that in the early practical way of life today.
Sometimes our work can be redeemed. Sometimes we have been doing work maybe for ourselves, maybe just for the money but you know what, it’s good work consistent with God’s kingdom and we can continue to do it well and now we can offer it up to God. I told the story in that series about an animator who had been animating for work and now she had the opportunity to animate scripture for a church I had started. That was the way for her to offer her work to God. That was great.
Sometimes our work needs to be challenged. Sometimes we have been engaged in work selfishly that simply cannot be done by somebody in God’s kingdom. Say you have been working in the porn industry. You become a follower of Jesus, that needs to get reset. You can’t continue working in that industry, but you can challenge it. Your role in God’s kingdom maybe to challenge that industry. To speak out against it. To let people know what it’s really like the dangers of it -how it’s actually a form of modern slavery. I could go on but you can see how some kinds of work can’t be offered or redeemed for God, they have to be challenged.
Finally some work can be subverted. There are times when our work is something that we have been doing for all the wrong reasons. It’s not directly supporting God’s kingdom to do that work but it’s also not something that needs to be completely confronted and challenged and what we can do is we can be there as a follower of Jesus and subvert what’s happening there that is selfish, that is sinful, that is broken. We can undermine people’s belief in the idol of work and money and power and show them a different way by being there.
Followers of Jesus can’t withdraw from every industry. We can’t withdraw from finance and art and culture. We can’t withdraw from transportation, from supply chain management. We can’t withdraw from consumer products. We can’t withdraw from construction. I could go on and list all these industries. We can’t withdraw completely from the world. Christians need to be there and sometimes that looks like challenging and sometimes it looks like redeeming and offering it and sometimes it looks like subverting it and I highlight this one because that’s really what Colossians was talking about.
Paul was talking to slaves who happen to have become followers of Jesus. They are stuck in a system of slavery. It is the status quo where they live and what he wants them to do is undermine it. He wants them to subvert. He wants them to continue working for their owners but he wants them to know they are not truly owned by them. He wants them to be free, even though the world thinks they are slaves.
Now most of us have more freedom than the slaves that Paul is talking to but sometimes circumstances or responsibilities give us no choice. Sometimes we find ourselves in the kind of work where our only choice is to subvert. We have to stay there. We have no other choice to leave that work, we have to stay and subvert it. To undermine work’s ability to control us, to own us.
Really no matter what work we do, we can find ourselves feeling owned by that work. We can’t find ourselves handing over the entirety of our lives, our entire identity, our entire sense of security and confidence in life to our jobs. We can use our job titles to describe all of who we are. When we are doing that, we are selling out to work, we are selling ourselves to slavery, willingly. That is the system in our world. That is the system of slavery in our Western world. We willingly sell ourselves to work and if that’s happening in your life, then please subvert it. Undermine its power over you and continue to show others while you work alongside them, what it looks like to be a follower of Jesus in your industry.
Keep working. Work well at it. Show them what it’s really like to be an artist who does art for the Kingdom of God. Show them what is like to build for the Kingdom of God, to create for the Kingdom of God. To organize for the Kingdom of God. To lead for the Kingdom of God. Whatever kind of work you do, show people what that work looks like when it is done well and done for God and so doing it will subvert works power over yourself and over others.
Work may think it owns you, it may act like it owns you. The world may think that your work owns you, but you can undermine its power over you. Break yourself free from the chains of slavery and the only way you can do that is by turning to Jesus Christ as your soul source of self worth, of security and identity in this world. When you turn to him, as that soul ultimate source of meaning in life, you will find that things like work and money and so on, all comeback to the place they were always meant to hold in your life. Not the center or ultimate place, but on the periphery.
When we work for the Kingdom of God, living in the Kingdom of God, even well for the Kingdom of this world surrounds us, what we are doing is we are showing, to react to some of the things I said yesterday, that work could go wrong. We are showing people that we are not our own saviors but we are saved by God’s grace.
Our self worth and our self identity are not found in our work but they are found in Jesus Christ and that’s where we see ourselves as workers in God’s creation, advancing God’s kingdom and not as the creator ourselves. We see ourselves for who we truly are, we see other for who they truly are. That’s what Paul is telling bond servants and masters to do it in his letter to the Colossians we explored on Tuesday and that is what we can do in our working lives today.
And my challenge for you today is to think what concrete tools can I use to help me do the three things we’ve really talked about this week. What tools can I use in my workplace to keep working. To keep working there I can be a presence for God, I can either challenge it or subvert it or redeem it. What can I do to work well there? How can I show that this is work for God’s kingdom, for the sake of work being good and finally how can I work for God and doing you are going to bring other people along for the ride too. Map that out today. Think of what concrete tools you can use to actually make this happen. To keep working, work for God and work well.
Well have a great time discussing with your group what that looks like to put that into practice. I’ll see you tomorrow as we take time to pray and reflect. Don’t forget to read the Bible in sync as well. Bye for now.
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 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.
