01. Transcript
Andre, thank you so much for that good leadership in worship and to the three ladies also who made the music on the instruments. We often say thank you to them but that’s lovely. Just lovely; thank you so much.
Now, in the morning, we will work on this side of this outline some and perhaps you’ll have time to look at the list again. I think many of you took it down in your notes and perhaps you don’t need to look at the list but we are going to be trying to think about ways of preparing in special activities that may—over here, some of these—I think a good number of them that we have on the list might require preparation and might require the congregations to provide some special opportunities for training. ]1:39]
And we want to be thinking—our theme as you will recall is Confidence to be Leader Disciples—to be leader disciples—and this is designed for you folks because you are leader disciples. You take the lead in things, in ministry and so we are going to be thinking about how this might be handled where people could be trained and advanced in their work as leader disciples and then how they could in turn serve to train others. So, be thinking about that for in the morning and perhaps we will have some more time when the group can be involved in discussion of these sorts of issues.
This evening, I would like to work right away from where we left off in the family, but to spend most of our time on this Point C here on the outline: WORK. This is an awfully important topic for our confidence as disciples that we minister out of the strength that we have in our family and our work. Our inner life is restored by God’s touch to it and develops toward restoration as the family life and the work life come along in the same way.
I’d like for us to read a passage from Psalm 90 and then Ephesians 2: verses 5-10.
Psalms 90—take these as background passages for our thoughts this evening—and this is a Psalm about our life—the span of years that we have and our work.
Verse 10 of Psalm 90—
“Seventy years are given to us, and some may even live to eighty but even the best of these years are often emptiness and pain, soon they disappear, and we are gone. Who can realize the terrors of your anger? Which of us can fear you as he should. Teach us to number our days and to recognize how few they are. Help us to spend them as we should. Oh, Jehovah, come and bless us. How long will you delay? Turn away your anger from us. Satisfy us in our earliest youth with your loving kindness, giving us constant joy to the end of our lives. Give us gladness in proportion to our former misery. Replace the evil years with good. Let your miracles be seen again. Let our children see glorious things, the kind you used to do and let the Lord Our God favor us and give us success. May He give permanence to all that we do.”
I think I’ll just read the last two verses in the King James Version; they are very familiar—
“Let Thy work appear unto thy servants and Thy Glory to their children and let the beauty of the Lord our God be upon us and establish thou the work of our hands. Yea, the work of our hands; establish Thou it.”
And then from Ephesians, the 2nd chapter. This is one of those great passages from St. Paul that is used in many settings, but I think sometimes, especially among my own denominational people—the Baptists—they tend to use this verse just with reference to the topic of justification by grace through faith but let’s read verses 5 through 10:
“Even when we were dead in sins, God has quickened us together with Christ. By grace are you saved and hath raised us up together and made us to sit together in Heavenly places in Christ Jesus. That in the ages to come, He might show the exceeding riches of His grace in His kindness toward us through Jesus Christ. For by grace are ye saved through faith and that not of yourselves—it is the gift of God not of works, lest any man should boast. For we are his workmanship created in Christ Jesus unto good works which God hath before ordained that we should walk in them.” [6:57]
We’ve talked this morning about that precious unity that is given in the family as we find the redemption of the Kingdom of Heaven coming into our lives and healing the past and making the future a time of love between ourselves and our mates and our children. And really, the relationship continues in our work right from our family.
I spoke this morning about how in other times, the family was much more of an economic unit that they worked together. They provided a common core of workers. They had common jobs that they did together, and their work was meaningful in the family context. And how that is no longer true often, but yet one of the sweetest things that can happen to a man, or a woman is to have their mate involved with them in their work so that it’s a common enterprise. [8:15]
You know, the unity between a man and a wife really does come together when they are working together and indeed, one of the things we must say I that as Christians, we must be able to think of our work in such a way that it involves our wives or our husbands and ourselves. And what I am going to be doing this evening in part, is trying to reconceptualize work so that it will be clear how that’s to be done. And of course, this will require that we distinguish work from job and re-define our work together so that we can really be involved in common enterprise. We want to be together with those we love and if we can’t be together with them, it creates real grief in our hearts, doesn’t it? And working together is one of the ways that we can be together. Other ways are just experiences.
One of the reasons I most hate to travel without my wife is that I can’t say, “Look at that!” You know how that is? Trevor’s little Markie is learning to walk or fly or something [Laughter]—sometimes it isn’t quite clear but it’s with great enthusiasm, whatever it is, and I’ve often wanted to just say to Jane, “Look at that! Look at that!” Look at that—sharing comments, sharing perceptions is one of the most important parts of life together that people who love one another have, isn’t it? [9:56]
Jack and Monica spent three months just looking at things together, huh? Yes. It’s a wonderful thing to just be able to look at things together—the sharing of perspective.
Peter adds to that a dimension which we must not miss in 1 Peter the third chapter I think it is—1 Peter 3—listen to these words—1 Peter 3:7:
“Likewise, ye husbands, dwell with your wives according to knowledge, giving honor unto the wife as unto the weaker vessel and as being heirs together of the grace of life, that your prayers be not hindered.” [10:54]
So, the power of prayer itself is related to the way in which two people are receiving together the grace of life. That’s another great thing about the unity in the family and the children too is that we stand together, and we receive the grace of God. We work together. We see things together. We receive the grace of God together.
In the unity of love that is in that family with the children also is one of the things we must never do no matter how difficult our time is with our children—one of the things we must never do is to say to them or to think that they don’t love us because they do love us, and it hurts them deeply when we accuse them of not loving us. It hurts them deeply; and so that’s one of the things we must really try to preserve is, never come to that point to where we say to them, “You don’t love me.” You usually don’t say it in that tone. Scream at them that—“You don’t love me!” Or to think that thought; it’s such a terrible thought and it really makes it hard for us then to come together. And these declarations of not loving or statements of not loving, you simply have to stay away from them no matter how tempted we are. [12:30]
Now, the unity of love in the family should extend to the work which the members of the family are doing, and, in some parts, this will be different. But I just want to say to you now, every human being on this earth is given a work.
Every human being on this earth is given a work. That is a part of what it means for them to be a human being. That is what it means for them to be in the image of God. To be in the image of God is to have a work. God has a work, doesn’t He? And He gives us the power to have a work.
Now, notice the strange way I am putting this perhaps. I am not just saying, “to work” as a verb but “a work” as a noun. Every human being—I’m not saying every human being works. I am saying every human being has a work and I am challenging you now to think about that and to say, as we go through the evening, “What is my work? What is my work?” Every human being has a work and perhaps we need to divorce it a little bit from the idea of work because work doesn’t have a very pleasant connotation to many people. Like, my brother next to me, says, “I am not afraid of work. I can lie down right next to it and go to sleep.” [Laughter] And that’s the way we often think about work as something to be avoided if at all possible. That’s because we have an idea of work which is after the fall.
Remember back in Genesis 3, God tells Adam that he is going to now have to live from the earth and he is going to have to earn his bread by the sweat of his brow. And this idea of work as something burdensome and difficult, something that causes you to sweat, that many people don’t like. And there’s certainly reason for that, I suppose. [15:01]
But, I want to just say that, on the other hand, God said to Adam, “Cursed be the ground for Thy sake,” in the Old King James version and no matter how difficult work may be, the only thing worse than work is not having any. And that is really a terrible lot and also you see it not just in people who not only have work but don’t have money but the lives of those who, as it were, earn their living by the sweat of someone else’s brow. People are really into that. Cities are often places where large numbers of people earn their living by the sweat of someone else’s brow. If you are out in the country on your own, you pretty well have to go on what’s on your own brow to get something to eat and to live by.
Cities tend to pull people together and then they tend to begin to use and organize one another and many people really don’t do their part in the task of humanity and I’m not just meaning by work—physical work, but any kind of work. You see, you have many people who do no work at all but yet, they have been able to get themselves in positions where they can benefit from the labors of others. And this is a very corrupting condition. It doesn’t corrupt in the same way; it doesn’t hurt in the same way as the person who has no work and nothing to support themselves on, but we are meant to work. We are meant to work, and work is for our sake and the curse that is in work is not necessarily a part of it and especially for the child of the Kingdom. [16:47]
For the child of the Kingdom, they are to walk in what we have been learned and we’ve been talked to speak of as the easy yoke of Christ. And he says, “my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.” (Matthew 11:30) They are taught to work but to work restfully—to work as we have seen in our various sessions. We’ve been talking about to work like the birds do, to work like the lilies do. They work but they work restfully. They work in a way which doesn’t involve all the fret and the worry and the sweat and the pain.
And in the community of God, we are taught to be co-laborers with God and that gives us a new and a very much better conception of work. And I hope that it will also embolden us to now, once again, think in terms of “a work” which is “our work.”
In helping us, let’s just state a general conception of what work is and hopefully we can then begin to see how work might not be such a bad thing after all and how each of us can have a work under God. [18:06]
So, let me just say that—you won’t be able to see it if I write it up here so let me just—it’s a very short statement. What is work? What is work? Work is the expending of energy—the expending of energy to produce something of lasting value and if you wish, put more or less, lasting. For example, under this definition, a birthday cake, which you might cook, would be—that would be work. It would produce something of value that would remain after the work is done and it could be enjoyed for a certain length of time depending upon how many people there are.
A rugby game, on the other hand, expends a lot of energy but produces no lasting value. [Laughter] Comment was made that “some people are going to live with the results of that game forever.” Yes, but most of those didn’t work. [Laughter] Now, the fellas who played—I presume these are professional teams? No! No? You mean they didn’t get paid? No! Well, then it was play. It was play. [Laughter] Now, the guys that bet on it, well, that wasn’t work either but for different reasons. [19:49]
So, now this is an important concept and all of the important principles in the spiritual life or many of them have very close analogs in the physical world and this is very close, those of you who have studied Physics, to definitions of work which might be given in Physics. Of course, in Physics it’s stated in a much more formal kind of way. But basically, it is just the expending of energy to produce something of lasting value. [20:25]
Now, I hope you will immediately see that this applies to many, many things that we do in life. For example, it applies to having children and raising children. It would apply to teaching someone something of value. It would apply to many of the—most all of the relationships which we enter into; for example, you have to work to produce friendship. Did you know that? And, you have to work to maintain a good or loving relationship in your family to your children. So , you see, work is a general concept, and it is much more than a job.
A job is usually work, usually you expend energy to produce something of more or less lasting value but now, I hope you are beginning to see that there is no reason why your job should be your work. This in the modern world is one of the great curses of people because they are unable to relate their job to their work. And very often, they feel terribly deprived because the job seems to them to not be of value other than just to produce money. You will hear people say, “I’m just doing it for the money.” Well, I understand the difficulty that is sometimes involved here but let me just say that that is a terribly faithless way to approach one’s job. Our jobs should be good work in a basic sense that they are valuable. They produce value for people. Things that are needed. They should be good work and if we are doing that job, we should be able to do it as Paul, says, “to the glory of God.” [22:40]
Listen to these words from Corinthians 10 and the 31st verse, “Whatever therefore ye eat, ye do; whether therefore ye eat or drink or whatsoever ye do, do all to the Glory of God.” That’s 1 Corinthians 10:31. Whether therefore ye eat or drink or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God.”
Now, when I go to my job, it should be possible for me to do that job to the glory of God and if it isn’t, then I should ask God to help me find a job which I could do to the glory of God. One of the problems here is that the world has a set of values, and it says that if you are in some kinds of jobs, you are worthless. Now, I hope you know that what my comeback to that is in the Kingdom of God—”blessed are those who have the jobs that are regarded as worthless by humanity because God knows that they are of service, and He will bless people in them.” [23:56]
See, in our country, about the lowest thing on the totem pole is the car wash. Do you have car washes here? ____?____ [Laughter] or something like that. You have car washes. And I’ve remembered for a long while trying to help a young man who couldn’t find a job except in the car wash, and it just crushed him to work in the car wash. And I couldn’t understand that because being from the lower social economic myself, I didn’t understand. If you had a job, you were supposed to be glad you had a job if it was a decent job, but he just couldn’t take that because he was thinking of his life as somehow being given to that car wash.
Well, now that’s the kind of impasse we have to avoid if we are going to be confident in our lives as lay priests because you see, if we feel that way about our job, we are not going to be able to glorify God in it. Much less, be thankful for it. [25:26]
In Colossians 3:17, “Whatsoever ye do in word or deed, do all in the name of the Lord Jesus giving thanks to God and the Father by him—Colossians 3:17
Well, both of those statements by Paul presuppose a Kingdom attitude towards jobs.
Now, it is true that in Paul’s day, probably they didn’t have the same concept of job as we have. We have a very special modern conception of a job and we have to deal with the alienation between job and work as perhaps no other age has had to do because we are working in a money system. That is very different from anything that has prevailed before. See, everything we get really does come to us through money. The money system is one where if the money has to be kept flowing then you do the job to keep the money flowing and then you are able to do and get whatever things you want. And there never has been before the 20th century or perhaps the 19th century a society in which it was so money driven. That’s what makes the job so important in the life of the individual. No job, no money; no money; no nothing. [26:51]
And so, the job comes to just harass us—just to sit on our heads and say, “You’ve got to keep grinding away” and now we really need a lot of grace to break that chain. We really need a lot of grace to break that chain because when you’ve been in the society in which I was raised, if a person didn’t have a job, well, they had their house —it might not have been much, but they had their house; they had a place to stay; they perhaps could eat off of the land or other people give them a little something. But now, I mean you’ve got to have your car, you’ve got your credit cards, you’ve got all of these involvements that you have, and you can’t eat off the land very well now, can you? There’s not much out there that hasn’t already been grabbed by someone and so it’s a different world. So, we have to recognize this about jobs. If we are going to succeed in reintegrating our working time into the Kingdom of God and we do that by the conception of our work. [27:59]
Let’s try to weigh that out now where we can get ahold of it. What is our work? What is our work? And perhaps we can put it this way. What is the mark we are going to leave on the world? What is the mark we are going to leave on the world? Another way of putting it is to say, “What is our lives to count for? “What are our lives to count for?” And immediately many of us will want to say, “Well it certainly isn’t my job.” A person who works in a factory, it’s hard for them to think that their life amounts to putting so man nuts on so many bolts for so many days. And many of us have work which is meaningless in that or similar sense. Now, but if you don’t, I know that many of you work in different kinds of jobs, but there’s a high percentage of people in our world that work in jobs that are very alienating from their lives in that way. They just do the same thing over and over so many times a day and then they go home and then they do that again. No matter what our job is, there is a real challenge to make that job count as a part of our work. I hope that you now don’t feel too uncomfortable about thinking about your work in life. Do you feel comfortable with saying that you have a work in life and that your life is counting for something? [29:48]
I am pausing to just give us a chance to feel over those words. What does my life count for? What your life counts for will be your work. But in order for your life to count for something, you must, in faith, claim your work. You must say, “Yes, this is my work.” It is not something that, for the ordinary person is just poured on their heads. So, what now is your vision of your work in life?
We have to broaden our vision. Perhaps we have to begin to try to focus our vision for the first time. It may be that some of us here have never asked ourselves that question. Perhaps it has been rumbling around in our spirits and bothering us. Very often women have a very hard time asking that question. What is my work in life? For what does my life count for? And sometimes, the question seems to be rather automatically taken care of by simply subordinating themselves to their husband—[Recording went silent [31:19 to 32:09]—is just poured on their heads. [32:09] [Some of this seems to be repeated below.]
So, what now is your vision of your work in life. We have to broaden our vision. Perhaps we have to begin to try to focus our vision for the first time. It may be that some of us here have never asked ourselves that question. Perhaps it has been rumbling around in our spirits and bothering us. Very often women have a very hard time asking that question. What is my work in life? For what does my life count for?
And sometimes, the question seems to be rather automatically taken care of by simply subordinating themselves to their husband or their children’s work but if they don’t have a husband or children, then that raises special problems for them. That’s one reason why people who are not in families have to be given special grace is because they don’t have these questions answered. The meaning of their life is not what it used to be. And if the meaning of our life hasn’t been in our families, then let me say that that is one of the best ways that we can possibly do that. The meaning is in terms of other people. The meaning of our life is in terms of other people, you see. [33:32]
But when the other people are gone or there is some division or some loss, well then, there is a real challenge to our vision to be able to include our present times with that other time and put them both under God and say, “My work goes on.” It’s so important to have that, isn’t it because you know how many times, when one mate dies, the other one dies. Why is that? Well, this is a peculiarly at trenchant application of the saying that we all hear quoted from the scriptures; “Without a vision the people perish.”
Here is another phenomena that you are familiar with. Many times, a person will retire at the mandatory age from their business or something—65 and they are dead within a few months. It happens over and over and over. What was going on? So often, what was going on there is very simple. Their work in their mind was the same thing as their job. So, when their job was over, they are dead. This is real stuff, isn’t it? You know? This is real stuff, and we have to think about it. [35:54]
And maybe while we are younger, we are just by the course of our natural juices able to keep going but that takes a very high toll if we don’t begin to integrate what we are doing around some concept of our work. What does our lives count for? And I’m this evening, really just trying to give you a challenge on that. What does our lives count for? And asking you to say, “What enduring value do I intend to create in my life? What enduring value do I intend to create in my life?”
Now, I hope you all, at this point are beginning to see how the circle is going to close here and how in pursuing this question, we are going to come back to our list. You see, all of those things we put on that list this morning, are they not cases of work as we are talking about it here—we are producing enduring value—and indeed, the most enduring value. These are the treasures laid up in Heaven. And we must have a conception of our work which allows us to relate our day-to-day existence to our vision of the Kingdom of God. [36:31]
But this is not all of what we are doing, and we have to remember that our basic life really does stay in this domain. Out of this, we minister. Out of this, we move to this kind of work. Now, the difference between the lay priest and the priest-priest is that their work or their job, I should say, their job happens to fall in the area of these activities over here. That’s their job. Hopefully that’s their work too or a large part of it. Right?
But you see, a minster might have that as their job and their work be much larger than that—a very important point that we need to make over and over. The minister’s work includes the raising, for example of his family, but that’s not on the list, is it? You see how important it is to bring these together now and to think out the connection because the minister also will have a work and that work will not be his job. And in the modern world, it just is not true in any case, any healthy case, that the person’s job is their work. Their work consists of that total complex of lasting value which they produce. That’s their work. [38:07]
Now, do you see at this point how the family gets re-integrated into work? Because you see, the wife and the husband though they don’t work at the same job are invited in the Kingdom of God and in their love together to have the same work. And that certainly they can be different ins some respects; we need to inspire one another, encourage one another as husbands and wives to pursue our own interest in some measure but together we have a work—there is something together that we are producing and that would involve our house—the making of a home.
We used to speak of women as homemakers in the United States but that’s not so common anymore. In fact, you can just about insult a woman sometimes by calling her a homemaker and that may be another indication of the depths to which we have fallen. But basically, many, many people regard homemaking as kind of an insult because it’s not a job. Well, you all tell me that it’s work alright—it’s certainly work but why is it not a job? Because it does not have a salary attached to it. You see. [39:33]
So, that job and that salary thing keeps coming back to haunt us. We have to be very careful about how it pins us in. And many, many women in the United States are now moving into their forties and they have accepted the idea that somehow that if it wasn’t a job, it didn’t matter and now they are beginning to really wake up and say, “Wait a minute. Is my life about a job? Is that what it’s about?” And they are beginning to re-think their lives precisely along the lines of what is going to be their work. So, suppose you become Vice-President of a bank, right? Or suppose you get elected a U.S representative or something of that sort. Well, that’s important; that could be quite important but is that my work? Is that what my life counts for?
And the sharing of life together in a family is one of the things that is a major value, and we don’t have to be married though being married is certainly one of the ways that we most commonly think of, but life together is what really counts for human beings. People who have never been married; people who are single can have life together with other human beings. It’s the way we give ourselves to others and that they give themselves back to us that seems, in the end to count the most. Why? [41:27] [Silence from 41:27 to 41:38] And to help and to build and to encourage and to share with other human beings is to do something of value that lasts for eternity.
Now, I believe that each of us, as a disciple of Christ is challenged to turn our job, the occupations we follow into a part of our worth. It’s easy to neglect this. It’s easy for us to just look at our work as a way of making money but I think that’s a real failure in our faith and in our understanding if we do that. [42:23]
What we are challenged to do is to make our ordinary work—our business if you wish—to make that God’s business—to make sure that what we are doing in our occupation is done as Paul says, “to the glory of God” and “in the Name of Jesus Christ” and to take him into that and make that prosper as a part of his work.
You see, we are so used to things just getting along at a human level that if we are a doctor, or a dentist, or a lawyer or an accountant or a banker, or an automobile mechanic, or a truck driver, we man just think, “Well, you know, God doesn’t care about that.” God cares about this. God cares about it. [43:14]
Now, I just want to remind you of our little idea of the Kingdom of God as something that . . . [writing on the board] involves . . . we have the earth and the first and second Heavens. We’ve gone over this I think with almost everyone who is here. But then the third Heaven is not something that is just outside of that but something that intersects all of it. God is everywhere—the Kingdom of God is everywhere, and you will remember how we’ve illustrated this from time to time but just to take the statement from Paul in Acts 17—“in him we live and move and have our being.” So, if we are driving a truck or if we are cleaning the floor or mowing the lawn or working out a great big multi-national deal in some corporation or whatever we are doing, God is there. God is there.
“The eyes of the Lord are upon the righteous and his ears are ever open to their cries. The eyes of the Lord run to and from throughout the whole earth to show himself strong on behalf of them who heart is perfect towards him.” (2 Chronicles 16:9) He’s there. [44:52]
And so now, no matter what I may be engaged as I work, God is at hand and He’s there to be a part of my work and one of the things that we have to learn to do is to take him into it constantly—to invite him in, not just when there is an emergency because you see, there might be an emergency if you wish when we didn’t even recognize it. Now, I’ve called on the Lord in an emergency a lot of times and he has answered and that’s wonderful, but you see, I need to call on him too when I don’t think there is an emergency because after all, he may have things in mind for the work I am doing that I don’t even know about, you see? [45:38]
And I have some of the most humbling experiences for me in prayer have been really little incidents involving automobiles and things of that sort where I would go on for a day or a week struggling with something and then I would suddenly remember, “Oh, yeah, pray.” And immediately an answer would come.
I bought a 74 Datsun pickup in 1974 and that blasted thing had the worst habits. They put so many smog things on it—smog devices over there—that it was impossible to tune it and the timing on that thing would just slip little milliliter and it would start spluttering and coughing and I put up with that for two months and I would take it in and they would look at it and they would say, “Well, you know, you just have to keep driving it.” Well, that creates a problem.” So, one day, right in the middle of the freeway it did it again—started spluttering and coughing, and all of that sort of thing and I said, “Lord, please help me with this thing.” And it died. [Laughter] So, now, wait a minute, that’s not what I had in mind by way of help, and but I put the key back over to start it and it ran perfectly. I had my answer. Now I knew what to do. When it went into its fit, just turn it off and restart it. [Laughter] [47:20]
Now, I want to tell you. I had been driving that thing for three months and it had never died on me. It would just get into this terrible cataleptic sort of fit and it had never died. And I prayed, it dies. It started and I had my answer.
I’ve had other things like that. My wife is especially good at praying for washing machines. [Laughter] She will tell you. She has had tremendous results with it. Now, you say, “That’s all silly.” No, I’ll tell you, it isn’t. It really isn’t it. It seems silly because we are so used to excluding God from everything but the big crisis moments in our lives.
I could tell you some hair raisers about that too, but you know, you hear enough of those, and it really is so important for us to understand that God is interested in the little moments, the non-crisis moments in our lives and we invite him into that. And we say, “Lord, help me with this.” I have a meeting coming up. Maybe large things are an issue and maybe not so much or maybe there are some people who are loggerheads with one another. Remember, God has an interest in them. Pray about it. Take God into your business. See, in this way, my way I like to put this is, we make our lives our religion. Instead of our throwing away our lives and making religion our life. [49:03]
See, we’ve had this tradition that if you go to being really religious and throw away the ordinary life and get a special religious life and that’s just a way of keeping God out of the world. That’s all it is. Let’s just say, “Well, God we’d like to have you in our special moments and so since I would like to have you in my life, I will make my life one big special moment.” Right, and so , I go up to a monastery. Well, that’s a big limitation on the Lord, isn’t it? We need to re-think that, and we need to work our minds around where we understand that we are going into business with God, no matter what our business may be. We invite him into it. And we counsel with him. We talked a great deal in previous sessions about guidance and the conversational relationship with God. Now there have been a few testimonies that have come back even since we talked about from folks at both churches about how God has been speaking to them about this business. God wants to speak to us in our business. He wants to be a part of our lives. [50:20]
So, what I am saying to you this evening—our confidence and power as lay
priests is definitely tied to the way we invite God into all of our lives—all of our business. We don’t have a part of our lives which is our business and another part which is God’s business. It’s all God’s business. And when we live in that way, then our strength and confidence to carry out the special events and times that are noticed in our list over here is just immensely increased.
We don’t have to shift gears. We are all living right all of the time. We are living under the hand of God. And so now if the time of ministry comes of some sort; it’s just the same thing.—serving the same God because I have been ministering to him over here in the auto shop fixing the automobiles. So now, another occasion comes, and I minister to him in another way. So, you don’t go from the non-ministry to the ministry. You go from this ministry to that ministry. Hmmm? But we have such a hard time, I think getting this fixed in our minds. [51:44]
I would like to just associate that with a great story from the book of Genesis, Chapter 28. I think it’s a story you will know. But I want to really emphasize a word or two here in the story if you wouldn’t mind just glancing at it with me. You might what to mark it.
This is the story of Jacob. And while the Lord was interested in Jacob and his family, Jacob was not really one of your fine upstanding type. The fact is, he was a pretty crooked fellow. He seems to have been good in his heart but always ready to give in to some device which would get what he wanted. Familiar picture, isn’t it? [52:29]
But as also is familiar, this inevitably wound up putting him on the run. He had pulled one too many over on his brother, Esau and now at least in Jacob’s mind, he was sure that Esau was going to kill him and so he ran. He ran to his Uncle Laban—and on the way he became weary and lay down to sleep—Verse 11—of Genesis 28:
That night when he stopped to camp at sundown, he found a rock for a headdress and lay down to sleep and dreamed that a staircase or a ladder reached form earth to heaven, and he saw the angels of god going up and down on it. And at the top of the stairs stood the Lord. I am Jehovah , he said, the God of Abraham and of your father Isaac. The ground you are laying on is yours. I will give it to you and your descendants for you will have descendants as many as the dust. They will cover the land from east to west and from north to south and all the nations near it will be blessed with you and your descendants. What more, I am with you, and I will protect you wherever you go and will bring you back safety to this land. I will be with you constantly until I finish giving you all I am promising. [54:08]
And then Jacob woke up and said, “God lives here” He exclaimed in terror. I’ve stumbled into his home. This is the awesome entrance to Heaven.
The older version reads as follows:
And Jacob awaked out of his sleep and he said, “Surely the Lord is in this place, and I knew it not. The lord is in this place, and I knew it not.” And he was afraid and said how dreadful is this place. It is none other than the house of God and this is the gate of Heaven.
“The Lord is in this place, and I knew it not.” Are you beginning to understand what a constant theme this is of people who do not recognize the presence of the kingdom of Heaven? And yet, here the angels are ascending and descending on the staircase right down into that old ravine there where Jacob had pulled a few rocks together and laid that rock out there and put his head down on it and went to sleep with the scorpions and the snakes slithering around the rocks and the cactuses—he didn’t see God. “Surely God was in this place, and I knew it not.” You see, that applies to your kitchen, your workshop, your library, your study, your schoolroom. God is in this place. God is in this place. [55:44]
Now, he probably is not going to give you a dream like that because he has made it clear in the scriptures and it is our part to invite him in . . . and when we do invite him in, we will be able to trace the effects of his presence at our invitation in changing things for the better that we ask him to change.
I am going to repeat that because you see I am not just making a statement about the metaphysical reality of God that God is present everywhere. I am saying that when we by faith invite him into our activities, we will begin to see him change for the better—those things and processes that we are concerned with. You will see situations with people transformed because we’ve prayed, and you will see material differences in things you are working on.
I’ve got one of my automobile stories that I still wonder if I should tell people because it’s just so crazy . We went out once to get in the car and go to a conference 400 miles away. I had an old Oldsmobile at that time, and I started it up and it started pumping gas right out on the driveway in front of the car. And I quickly turned it off, needless to say, and so, we didn’t know what to do. At that particular time, we were very short on money as well as brains and we didn’t really know what we were going to do about this situation and so my wife and I just sort of sat there for a while and we prayed about it. And, I said, well, I’ll have to try to drive it to a shop and get it fixed because I didn’t have time to fix it myself and so we started it up—no gas. [57:53]
Now, if you are familiar with gas pumps, you know that’s about as unlikely a thing as could possibly happen because when gas pumps start pumping gas out on the ground, they don’t just quit but that one quit and it never had to be replaced.
God doesn’t fool around with gas pumps. Why not? He made them. He can fix them. Right? I’ve got more stories like that, but I won’t go on.
It’s really strange how automobiles—I think it’s because—I think the Lord did that for me because when I was young, I began driving when I was 13 or 14 and I drove old cars across the country that you wouldn’t think would make it over the next hill. And I became extremely bothered about those things—gas pumps in particular, by the way. [Laughter] I had a 42 Ford once that had the most impossible arrangement on its gas pumps and I have sat out in the middle of Kansas fixing that thing and in the middle of Tenseness fixing that thing and I think the Lord just sort of said at some point, you know about these. I’m going to show you something about them. And it really has meant a lot to me because you know, if I didn’t know anything about gas pumps and he did that, I might just think, “Well you know that’s fluke.” I knew it was not a fluke because I knew how gas pumps worked and that just does not happen. You, see? The Lord is interested in that. And he’s kind to us. You, see? He’s kind. The Lord is kind. We don’t say that very often, I think. We should say it more often. The Lord is kind. [59:52]
Sometimes we don’t understand the way he works. Many times, we don’t. Many times, we think, “Well if he were kind, he would give me what I have asked him for.” Well, he knows what he’s doing but he shows his kindness in so many ways when we begin to open up our lives in the little things. Sometimes the big things we would like for him to do, we are not able in faith to just lay it on his hands, because we are so concerned about it and somehow that gets in the way. I’ve seen that over and over also. It gets in the way, and we need others to join us in prayer about those things.
See, what I am saying is—take the Lord into your day-to-day business—in your kitchen, in your lawn, right? With your relationships with your neighbors, in your business downtown, with your accountant, whatever it is you do for a living. Take him into your business and you will find that this is indeed the gate of Heaven. [1:00:51]
And Jacob named this place Bethel as you know which means “the house of God.” That wonderful verse, “this is none other than the house of God and the gate of Heaven.” I didn’t know God was in this place. God was in this place, and I knew it not.” It is striking, isn’t it? That God can be in a place, and that’s not known? This is a part of the eternal humility of God.
You see, God is so unobtrusive. Jesus is so unobtrusive. The morning after his resurrection, one of his best friends was slipping through the garden.
Can you imagine that? If I had done what he did, I would come in there with a big, Huey helicopter. [Laughter] Blazing smoke tracks and sky writing and saying, “I am the Lord.” But you see, it’s the eternal humility and lowness of Jesus. That’s where we meet him. We meet him in our business. So, we need to be planning in our prayers. We need to plan our work around our prayers. We need to be –we really do need to state his plans and keep them in mind and pray over our work and we need to give some enthusiasm to what we want in our plans. [1:02:23]
There’s a wonderful story that is given us in 2 Kings 13—it’s a story about the King Joash, and this was his last interview with Elisha the prophet. Elisha is on his death bed. He is dying and King Joash comes to visit him because he actually has a little estate business to take care of.
2 Kings 13: and verse 14, we read,
“Now Elisha was fallen sick of the sickness whereof he died “
—and by the way, would you remember that? Elisha was not short on miracles, but he got sick and died. Would you just remember that?—And I’ve heard people just dance all around this business that if you could get healing, you should never be sick and say, “well but people die—they say, well you don’t have to get sick and die—get sick to die. You can just die anyway. Well, that’s true but now, I suppose it’s trust. Most people I know get sick and die. And Elisha got sick, and he stayed sick until he got cured by dying. And he was really cured permanently at that point so let’s just remember that now that people who really do work miracles of healing get sick and die.
See, that’s in John 40. We don’t get presumptuous about this stuff, ya know? We really don’t. I remember an old brother named Jack Cove that was back in Texas when was there as a young preacher and he said, “You know, it’s never God’s will that we be sick.” And poor old Jack got bulbar polio and died of it. [1:04:17]
Now, you see, that hurts people when they have been taught wrongly because they’ve been taught that healing and prayer is a kind of magic. You just get to where you hold your mouth right and it just works and so then all you had to do is get your mouth right [Laughter] and so you spend a lot of time practicing that, I tell you, but it isn’t that way, folks.
You can just try that word every way to get it out of your mouth but if it isn’t what God wants to do, it won’t work because our Word and our prayer with God it works by the authority of our place in God’s Kingdom. It doesn’t work because we got our mouths right and God isn’t foolish. He’s not waiting for us to perform some little trick ,you know?
Or the other way, if we say something wrong, he punishes us just because we said it wrong. It isn’t like that, and we have to remember it’s a very human kingdom in a certain sense. It’s very reasonable in the best sense of humans. It’s very reasonably human. God works at least as well as we do.
Remember how Jesus reminds us—“If you’ve been being evil. know how to give good gifts to your children, then they will probably also do that.” (Matthew 7:11) See there is a general principle of interpretation there that in whatever ways we are good, he’s even better. Okay? He’s even better. We use that as a general way of understanding God’s ways. And he wants us to be involved with him in the things that he is working out in our lives and in this passage in 2nd Kings, we see a rather challenging event because after King Joash gets down over the face of Elisha in verse fourteen and weeps, Joash, the King of Israel came down unto him and wept over his face and said, “Oh my father, my father, the chariot of Israel and the horsemen thereof.” Well, what’s he doing calling this dying old man the chariot of Israel and the horseman thereof. You see he had always had his faith in the wrong person. [1:06:49]
Now, the only association that Elisha had with the chariots of Israel were twofold. You remember that his own master, Elijah was taken up in chariots of fire. And then there is that other event that we talked about some in 2 Kings 6 where because Elisha, he never lost sight of those chariots of fire actually. He never lost sight of them. But the young man that we’ve commented on in Chapter 6 of 2nc Kings who was assisting him had never seen them and so when he went out and he saw the Syrian army surrounding their lowly little house there one morning , it scared him to death and he ran back in and said, “What are we going to do?” And Elisha said very calmly, “Fear not for they that are with us are more than they that be against us”—in verse 16 of chapter 6 of 2nd Kings and Elisha prayed that the young man’s eyes would be opened, and the Lord opened his eyes and he saw “and behold the mountain was full of horses and chariots of fire around about Elisha. [1:08:01]
Well, of course, King Joash knew about this and somehow, he didn’t get his eyes above Elisha. He just saw Elisha and thought, “My, it’s wonderful to have someone like this on my side but he never got his eyes raised up to the true source, the Kingdom of God, the power that is really in that Kingdom and that we can enter into and be a part of. We have to enter into by our initiative and the rest of this story illustrates that and Elisha said unto King Joash, “verse 15—“take bow and arrow and he took unto him bow and arrow and he said to the king of Israel”—that is Joash, “put your hand upon the bow and he put his hand upon it and Elisha put his hand upon the king’s hand”, and he said, “Open the window eastward and he opened it and then Elisha said, “shoot” and he shot and he said “the arrow of the Lord’s deliverance and the arrow of deliverance from Syria for thou shalt smite the Syrians in apec til thou has consumed them. Now listen to this curious part of the story.
“And Elisha said to the King, “Take these arrows”, and he took them and he said to the King, “Smite upon the ground and he smote three times and stopped and the man of God was angry with him and said, “you should have smitten five or six times, then you would have smitten Syria until you had consumed it; where as now, you shall smite Syria but three times. What was that about? [1:09:48]
That was about the enthusiasm with which we invite God into our business. That’s what it was about. Joash was a person who had plenty of opportunities to learn about this. And yet, he had not learned his lessons and as a result, his business did not prosper in the extent to which it should have because when the man of God said, “Smite the earth with the arrow,” he was half-hearted. You can easily imagine a person who would just go to town with that and beat a hole in the ground because the man of God after all was someone whom you should give full measure to, but Joash didn’t, and it was a part of his trouble in all of his rule that he never seem to arise much above half-heartedness. [1:11}
So, we are to plan, and we are to bring God into our lives. Now, when we do this, we plan, and we pray to our plans and plan to our prayers. We weave them together. We pray to our plans and plan to our prayers; then our faith has something to get ahold of and we begin to see a regular interaction of God with our work. And one of the most interesting things that happens here now is that our life begins to be transformed because we begin to really find our work. Our work with God—we begin to find it. And you see people, many times who are still back down here struggling [writing on board] with sin, okay? You see people struggling with sin. That is, they are still in a position where they don’t do the things, they think they ought to do, and they do the things they think they ought not to do and if they are struggling but then they move up a little bit.
Co-working with God, they learn how to work with God. Synergism is two energies working together in the same goal—the same purpose—they learn how this is by their day to day—how this works by the day-to-day interaction with the Kingdom of Heaven. [1:12:52]
And then, thirdly, they find their worth in God’s kingdom. They find their worth in God’s Kingdom. Now, what is interesting about these three stages is the person who gets here just no longer struggles with number 1. And the reason they don’t is because their life is so filled with goodness and strength that what used to be tempting to them looks like slop, you know? I mean, imagine a person saying, “Well, you know, I love to lie. I just love to lie. I’ve got to give up lying?” Being a follower of Jesus Christ. Oh, that’s such a loss. I just can’t face it. Well, you see that’s the person who might be perceived as struggling but when person comes to the appoint to where there whole worth—their whole life, their job, their family –all of it is seen together as the house of God—the gateway to Heaven! But the stuff that used to tempt them looks like slop. It really does! Hurting people—you mean, I’ve got to give up hurting people? Oh, why? [Laughter] It’s too much! I just can’t take it.
What do you mean I’ve got to quit worrying? What will I do without worrying? You see, when you begin to get into this area where you just have a sense that your life is God’s life, then God’s life is your life in the Kingdom of God, because you have grown now to the point where not only has the transformation come here, but it’s also come down to frame your work and this whole things now fits together and this is your life and your life is your work. Your life is your work. [1:15:25]
Lord Jesus , bless these thoughts to us this evening. Help us to understand how to live fully in this wonderful truth. We know that it is all of your goodness, but we have begun to understand how salvation by grace through faith means the redemption of our whole lives and not just the forgiveness of our sins. We have begun to understand that we truly are your workmanship created unto Christ Jesus, unto good works, which you intended all along that we should walk, and our hearts go out in praise and gratitude for you. We just want to bless everyone with it. Thank you, Jesus! Amen!