This sermon explores how a Christian understanding of vocation transforms our perspective on work. It emphasizes that all work is valuable to God, helps us correctly identify ourselves in Christ rather than our jobs, and protects us from common workplace temptations.
Transcript
Reading from Ephesians 6:5-9
Open your Bible again to Ephesians 6. And we’re going to look again at verses 5 through 9 that we began last week. Ephesians 6, beginning in verse 5. This is God’s holy and inerrant word.
“Slaves, be obedient to those who are your masters according to the flesh with fear and trembling and the sincerity of your heart as to Christ. Not by way of eye-service as men pleasers, but as slaves of Christ, doing the will of God from the heart. With goodwill render service as to the Lord and not to men. Knowing that whatever good thing each one does, this he will receive back from the Lord, whether slave or free. And masters, do the same things to them and give up threatening, knowing that both their master and yours is in heaven and there’s no partiality with him.”
Opening Prayer
Let’s ask the Lord’s blessing on his word. Father, as we approach this passage again today, we thank you for the richness of your instruction to us. And we ask Father that you help us to gain insight from your word. Bless us this week, think about this and meditate on it. And thank you, Father, for the life-changing word of God that transforms individuals, changes hearts, moves people from the kingdom of darkness into the kingdom of light, and changes cultures, changes the way people think and behave together. Father, I just ask for your grace this morning. Guide us into truth, we pray in Christ’s name. Amen.
The Transformative Power of the Gospel
We began this study last week and we applied it mostly last week in its original context. The Apostle is addressing slaves and masters in a system that had slavery. And so we spent some time talking about the institution of slavery as it was practiced in the first century and the recognition of the sinful nature of that institution, which was that it denied personhood of the individual. People were created in the image of God and that system objectified people. It saw people as objects, as tools to be used, to be manipulated, or to be exploited. And a slave in the first century could be executed at the whim of their master.
And yet, in this passage, we pointed out last week that Paul doesn’t say slaves rebel against your masters. He says, slaves be obedient to those who are your masters. So that raised some questions that we asked last week so that we’d think more deeply about this text.
And one of the things that we pointed out was that this instruction in the Christian culture of the first century was transformative of the culture. It changed the relationship of master to servant. It changed the culture in significant ways ultimately. And one of the examples that we pointed to at the end of the sermon last week was Onesimus. And we pointed out that when Tychicus was carrying this letter, the Ephesian letter, he was also carrying the letter to Colossae and a letter to Philemon. And he was bringing back Philemon’s slave, Onesimus. He was bringing Onesimus back to Philemon, who would either be branded under their law or put to death. But Paul was bringing him back as a new brother in Jesus Christ. And so what happened is that Philemon receives Onesimus not as a rebellious slave, but as a new brother in Christ. That relationship is changed. And see that’s what this passage does to the institution of slavery. It takes away the thing that is most objectionable about it, which is the devaluing of life. You can’t receive the person as a brother in Christ and still stay in that same relationship.
And so one of the interesting things that we mentioned last week was that one of John’s disciples, John had two disciples, Polycarp and Ignatius, and Ignatius in his writings, early writings, mentions the elder of Ephesus, the bishop of Ephesus, whose name was Onesimus. Almost certainly has to be that same person. If it wasn’t that person, it was certainly another slave because Onesimus, which means useful, is the name of a slave.
Anyway, it’s an interesting thing. God transforms culture. God’s word is powerful to transform culture. And this passage, what it’s pointing out is no matter what the relationship of the institution of slavery, the underlying work that the slave was doing was good for the beneficial of mankind, or God’s world, God’s world. God is blessing his world through work that God himself instituted at creation. So a godly understanding of the idea of work recognizes that God placed Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden to work it and to keep it. And that’s before there was a fall. So there’s benefit to work. There’s blessing in work.
I want us to explore that idea as we apply this to modern work relationships, especially today because that would be the way that we can make valid application from this passage. And what I’m going to suggest is that a godly understanding of vocation, having a calling from God that you’re gifted for, God has blessed you with, and a work to do, corrects our thinking about the work that he calls us to. Corrects our thinking about work in ways that’s necessary.
Work Is Valuable to God
First, a godly understanding of vocation teaches us that our work is valuable to God. I don’t know how it is with you, but in every job that I’ve had, there are times when the work seems to be mundane and pointless. It’s easy for us to think that our jobs have no meaning. We live in a transient world and in a transient world, change is inevitable and nothing lasts very long. We can start thinking about work that way. You have a job where you do the same thing every day, especially if you have a job that’s like that. It’s easy to fall into thinking that it’s so ordinary, so pointless. You make your bed one day and the next day, it needs to be made again, you know? And what’s the point? You rake the leaves and the seasons change and pretty soon you’re raking the leaves again. It’s easy to think that you’re building a sandcastle on the beach where nothing lasts and everything seems to be pointless.
But the truth is, the reality is, is that vocation is valuable to God. God has work for you to do and he blesses the world through the work that you do. And part of this is the doctrine of providence, the teaching of God’s providential care for his world. God is sovereign of his creation and he’s involved in its care. God keeps his creation existing. Hebrews 1:3 says that Christ upholds the universe by the word of his power. And he cooperates with the created things in every action. He directs their distinctive properties. He causes them to act the way they do. It’s his part of his purpose, his plan, his creation, it’s his created order.
Now, what I want to call your attention to is the root idea of that very word providence that we use to describe this, which means provide. God provides for his creation. He provides for his creation usually, almost always, through ordinary means. And part of those means is the work we do, it’s the vocations that we’re called to.
During the there was a period, we went to some detail last week, so I won’t repeat it, but in church history, there’s a period where the gospel itself was virtually lost. It wasn’t totally lost, but for most people it was lost. And along with that was the idea of work relationships. During the period of the Reformation, when the gospel began to be widely proclaimed, the biblical doctrine of vocation was also proclaimed as people started going to the word of God itself and teaching what it said. And so Martin Luther was one of the chief exponents of that truth. And he communicated it, and the Puritans also received that teaching, and they took it to heart. And so you have what’s called the Puritan work ethic, which was transformative to our nation. In its early days, we were blessed in great ways because people valued work, they valued pretty much any kind of work. It was something that they saw as God-given and necessary and a blessing to people.
That’s not the way that’s perceived today or taught. It hasn’t been for a long time. Years and years ago, about 100 years ago or so, I was at Virginia Western, some of my early college, took some classes at Virginia Western. And I took a government class. And the government class was taught by a man who was a social democrat, which don’t confuse that with the Democratic party overall. Basically he believed, and they believe in the tenets of communism. The difference between them and regular communists is that they believe that communism should be come about in a nation through the process of normal political action. So he would run for Congress every four years and he would get about three votes every four years, but he would keep running. He ran with the party, he’d run as an independent, but he ran each time.
And he had this to say about the Puritans. He didn’t hold the Puritans in high esteem. And he especially didn’t hold their work ethic in high esteem. He says, “Why do we have that?” He said, “It’s because they believed that God chose certain people and he rejected certain people. And the way that you know that you’re accepted by God is because you’re wealthy.” And that’s why the Puritan work ethic came about. You know, if you worked hard, you could prove God loves you.
Obviously, as I listened to that and a lot of other things that he said, I knew immediately that it’s ridiculous. And if you read the Puritans, which I hadn’t done much of at that time, but certainly have since, you find out that that’s not it at all, not at all. What they believed is that none of us are saved by works we do. And yet the works that God calls us to has great value to God. And it’s true for Christians and it’s true for people who are not Christians as well. The work that God does through his providential care is a blessing to people. And so that makes the work we do, even the work that we consider most menial, to be valuable to God. So God cares for us through ordinary means and usually through the gift of vocation. And that should help our thinking in a lot of areas when we realize that. And especially in terms of just general gratitude to God for the blessings he gives. When we get sick, we pray for healing. And God can heal through miraculous means. But he usually doesn’t. God provides for us and brings answer to our prayer usually when we’re sick through physicians and nurses and radiologists and medical technicians.
A few years ago, a couple of years ago, I was sick. I had an internal hemorrhage. And at the house, I passed out. My wife found me. She called 911 and she woke me up just as the EMTs arrived. And the EMT took my blood pressure and it was 30 over zero. And they gave me an IV and I began to get a little better. I was in shock, so I was shaking violently all the way to the hospital. But we had a conversation and he told me that he said, “The first time I took your blood pressure, it was 30 over zero.” And I said, “Well, if I survive this, I want you to know I really thank you.” And then I corrected myself and said, “Whether I survive this or not, I really thank you.”
Because God brings blessing to people. And he does it through ordinary means. And one of the ways he does it is through the work that he gives us to do. So the work that he gives us is valuable. There is dignity in honest work. And we should take pride in a job well done. Not pride in ourselves, but pride in a job well done. We should do things well. There’s dignity in the work.
Identify with Your Work Correctly
Secondly, a biblical understanding of vocation helps us to identify with our work correctly. And that’s really helpful. It’s easy for us to make an idol out of the job or to make an idol out of the people that we serve. But here it’s very clear that it’s the Lord that we serve, and it’s the Lord who owns us. It’s easy for us to be owned by our work. If you make an idol out of your job, you’re going to have tendencies like perfectionism, it would be one. And perfectionism means that you’re not able to do the job right.
When I was a child in grade school, I didn’t do well with anything because I believed that the product that I produced, whether it was a little drawing or a paper that I would turn in or anything, that if it wasn’t good, that meant that I wasn’t good. I identified with the work. People do that all the time with their work. People identify with their work in a one-to-one way. And so if the work doesn’t go well, they don’t do well. They don’t, you know, they take it personally every aspect of it. But look at this passage. Look what it says. Look at verse 5. It says, ‘Slaves, be obedient,’ and look how the verse ends, ‘to Christ.’ You be obedient as to Christ. The next verse, verse 6, ‘not man pleasers but as slaves of Christ.’ Verse 7, ‘render service as to the Lord.’ And in verse 9, ‘masters, you too. You remember your masters in heaven.’
We belong to the Lord. All of us belong to the Lord, but believers in particular are saved by the blood of Jesus Christ, purchased. And we absolutely belong to him. He is our identity. Our identity is wrapped up in the person of Christ. As you read through this book of Ephesians, over and over and over again, you find in Christ. You have that phrase. You have in him. And it’s repeated again and again to remind us that our identity is in the Lord. We as believers have an identity that’s wrapped up in Jesus Christ. Our life is hid with Christ in him.
And so that gives us some freedom here. If you’re owned by your job and you completely identify with your work, then the kinds of deep spiritual problems you have are devastating. I Googled the phrase ‘fired worker’. And what it suggested immediately was ‘fired worker shooting’. So I went with that. ‘Fired worker shooting’. And so, what do you get when you Google that right now? And you get ‘a fired worker at a popular Florida mall is on the run after authorities say he shot and killed a store manager and had a list of other co-workers.’ ‘In Aurora, Illinois, a man fired from his job has shot and killed five people and injured several police officers at his workplace.’ And it goes on and on. There’s more of those. And this is in the last month.
And what’s the nature of that? You have people who so identify with their job, when that job is threatened, they themselves, their person is threatened. And that’s devastating. Google has a page on postal shootings, just with the post office. And the story repeats itself over and over through the decades where a person’s job is threatened or there’s a conflict like that and he resorts to violence and suicide usually. And that’s where that phrase going postal comes from. The problem there, the underlying problem is an idol that we have set up where our identity is wrapped up in the work that we do. But a true Christian is protection against that. We’re not owned by our job. We belong to the Lord. Our identity has to be in Christ and not our vocation.
Martin Lloyd Jones was a wonderful physician and preacher during the 20th century. And in his biography by I. N. Murray, that’s called The Fight of Faith, he records Martin Lloyd Jones talking to a group of physicians. It applies certainly to doctors, but to all of us. And he said, “Somewhere in Pembrokeshire,” Martin Lloyd Jones was Welsh, “a tombstone is said to bear the inscription: ‘John Jones, born a man, died a grocer.’ There are many whom I’ve had the privilege of meeting whose tombstone might well bear the grim epitaph: ‘Born a man, died a doctor.’ The greatest danger which confronts the medical man is that he may become lost in his profession.” Well, Lloyd Jones was called to that profession, but he gave it up for a calling as a minister. He didn’t sacrifice his calling and vocation as a father to his family for the work. There was a balance there and the balance came about because he wasn’t owned by the jobs. He was owned by the Lord Christ. So that should be true of us. We were born a man, we’re born a woman. But we should die as a precious child of God. And that gives us balance that we need when we’re thinking about our relationship with our work.
Protection from Sinful Temptations
A Christian understanding of vocation protects us from sinful temptations in our work. Every job that you have has its own unique temptations. Masters, verse 9 says, ‘do the same things to them and give up threatening, knowing that both their master and yours is in heaven. And there’s no partiality with him.’ No partiality with Christ. Masters in the first century and bosses today, one of the temptations they have is to abuse the authority that God’s given. And if you abuse God’s authority, the Apostle reminds them and us that they have a boss in heaven to whom they’re accountable. Masters in the first century used threatenings. No doubt they used physical violence as well, the threat of violence to try to control their slaves. But Paul says, their master and yours is in heaven. And what that does immediately is it puts them in the same class. You’re both servants. You’re not above them. The temptation there is I’ve got a better job than he has. And that means that I’m more important than this person is. And so my rights and responsibilities exceeds the rights of this person. And that’s the way we can think in a job. That’s the temptation of any leadership job. And it is absolutely flawed thinking. We’re all servants of Christ. If we’re Christians, especially, we are all servants of Christ.
I was reading a section of Wingren’s commentary on Luther’s doctrine of vocation. And he says, you know, when any but one, if he’s an emperor or a craftsman, turns to God in faith, especially in prayer, he’s without the outer support which is his station, his position in society, gives in relation to others. You could be a king, you could be a shoemaker. But when you come before the Lord, it’s really just you and the Lord. The Lord judges us all one day. And we are all sinners in his sight whose works do not measure up to earn our salvation in any way, who are recipients of his grace, and therefore equal.
And so we can be tempted in various ways. Jobs can become about the money. And you can start spending your life in order to making all your decisions in your work. Instead of bringing the fact that your identity is in Christ and you as a Christian, that should shape your work. You can be swayed simply by the money or the practical nature of work. And so you would do anything to comply as long as you receive the money. Those are temptations I’ve had over the years. God’s blessed me so that I don’t think I’ve compromised on anything like that. But I’ve had temptations where I worked with an advertising executive who said, “I have this opportunity to get this with this organization and it’s going to mean a lot of money for us. Do you want to do that?” That kind of thing. And the organization is nothing that I’d be able to support. And so usually when that happened, I would take his paperwork home, even though I knew immediately that it wasn’t anything I was going to do, so that I could think about how I was going to phrase it next day when I told him, “I’m not going to do this.”
It’s not about money. Money is important, but our work isn’t about money. To be faithful in the work, and if you’re working for a business and the business is to make a profit, part of your job should be to see that the company makes a profit. But the profit isn’t the whole purpose of your work, it’s only one little aspect of it. It’s not even the main purpose. It’s just the necessary thing.
I think it was De Pree who wrote, “Money is like the air we breathe. You breathe the air in order to live, but who would live just to breathe the air?” It’s necessary, but what’s the point of it? And so how do you take your Christianity and use it to impact and shape the kind of work that you’re doing? What is it that God has? It’s not about the money, it is not about any of those things, it is about bringing blessing to people. The work that you do produces a product, some good thing. It produces a service. And that product or service brings blessing to people. And there’s value in that. If you are a janitor, and your work blesses people, then you are the very fingers and hands of God at work to bring the blessing providentially to his people. We need to keep that in mind.
But as Christians in the workplace, we’re to be salt and light in that. More and more in our society, workplace becomes devoid of any godly values. And so we need to make an impact in those areas for the Lord and in whatever work he calls us and gifts us for. One of Tim Keller’s books, he tells a story about this lady who visited his church. He’d seen that she’d come once or twice. And about the third or fourth time that she came, he came up to her and said, “How did you even find out about Redeemer?” And she says, “Well, there’s a story.” She worked for one of the major television networks. And she’d gotten a pretty good job. And she’d been promoted. Not long after she got that job, she made a really stupid mistake. It was extremely bad and she was pretty certain she was going to lose her job. But her boss went to his boss and he said, “You know, I should bear the blame for that because I really didn’t train her well.” And that may have been some truth to that, but he took an incredible hit. And he was well thought of by the company. And so they didn’t fire him, but, as they say, he lost a great deal of social capital. And so he went back to her and said, “You didn’t lose your job. Don’t worry about it. But let’s see how we can keep this from happening again.” And she said, “I can’t believe you did that for me.” And he said, “Don’t think about it.” And she said, “Why did you do that for me?” And he said, “Well, since you’re pushing me, I’ll say this. I’m a Christian. And I’ve based my life on Christ and what he’s done for me. He took the blame for me. That’s why I’m saved. I did something wrong and Jesus instead of just writing me off, went to the cross and he bore the blame because of that, I tried to apply that to my life. And I try to bear more pain than I inflict in all my work dealings.” She looked at him and said, “Where do you go to church?”
See, a godly view of vocation changes a lot of things. It changes our approach to the work, but it also changes people through us as we live out Christ in the callings that he gives us to.
Conclusion: Eternal Value and Hope
And it gives us hope. It’s worth a whole sermon, but the passage says, ‘knowing that whatever good thing each one does, this he will receive back from the Lord,’ this passage says. Think about that. God uses us, gives you gifts, puts you into a workplace where you can be used of the Lord. That thing that you produce brings benefit to who knows how many people? How many people’s prayers are answered because of the work you do? You do that work faithfully in faith to the Lord, and it bears fruit now and it bears fruit forever. And it bears fruit because God values it. If you’re a janitor and nobody else in the world thinks that anything that you do is worthwhile, but God thinks it’s worthwhile, then it’s worthwhile. He’s the one that sets the value for all things. If God thinks you’re beautiful, then you’re beautiful. And we’re beautiful in Jesus Christ through the work he’s done for us. And he gives us and enables us and calls us to work, to do things. Do things as Christians and do things in the workplace. And he changes the world and blesses it. There’s eternal value in the work we do.
Closing Prayer
Let’s pray. Father, we’re grateful to you for the way you have graced us to let us be a blessing to people and gifting us and giving us work to do. Help us to keep this in balance, recognizing that as the hymn says, ‘There’s nothing in my hands I bring, simply to the cross I cling.’ There’s nothing that I can do to work in work or in anyway to earn or merit my salvation. There’s nothing that we can do in that regard. And yet when we come in faith to receive Christ’s work for us, we are freed up to work in various ways, in work that has true meaning and significance and value before you, now and for eternity. Bless us, Father, as we pursue these things. Thank you, Father, for your gifts. The gifts of the spirit and the natural gifts you’ve given us. Thank you for the way that you’ve blessed the people here today. Use them in great ways to provide for your creation and to magnify your name. We pray in Jesus’ name. Amen.
