The Word Before Work

Sign-up for my free 20 day devotional, The Word Before Work Foundations, at http://TWBWFoundations.com Very early in the morning, while it was still dark, Jesus got up, left the house and went off to a solitary place, where he prayed. (Mark 1:35)“I’m swamped.” I’ve said it, you’ve said it, we’ve all said it at one overwhelmed point or another.The Bible tells us that Jesus’s disciples were once “swamped” in a different way. As they sailed across the Sea of Galilee “a squall came down on the lake, so that the boat was being swamped, and they were in great danger” (Luke 8:23). You know the rest of the story: Jesus “got up and rebuked the wind and the raging waters; the storm subsided, and all was calm” (Luke 8:24).This passage perfectly illustrates the core premise of this devotional series—namely that the solution to the disciples being swamped by the wind and waves is the exact same solution to our being swamped by our to-do lists and hurried schedules. The solution is found in Jesus Christ. How? In two ways.First, Jesus offers you peace before you do anything. Nearly every time management guru says that the path to peace and productivity is found in implementing their system. This is what we might call “works-based productivity.” As Christ-followers, we start with the opposite premise in what we might call “grace-based productivity,” which says that through Jesus Christ, we already have peace, and we do time management exercises X, Y, or Z as a response of worship.Here’s the second way that Jesus is the solution to our time management problems: Jesus shows us how God would manage his time. We unpacked this at length last week, so I won’t do so here. But suffice to say that when we read the gospels for the biographies they are, we can see at least 7 timeless time management principles modeled by Jesus Christ—the most purposeful, present, and productive Person who ever lived. Here’s the first:Principle #1START WITH THE WORDTo redeem our time in the model of our Redeemer, we must first know the Author of time, his purposes for the world, and what he has called us to do with the time he has given us.We see Jesus practicing this principle in Mark 1:35 when “Very early in the morning…[he] went off to a solitary place, where he prayed.” Throughout the gospels, we see Jesus prioritizing time with the Father above everything else, including sleep (see Luke 6:12). We must do the same.But let’s be honest. Making “quiet times” a meaningful habit can be hard. I’ve experimented a lot with this practice over the years, and I’ve recorded a quick video that breaks down what works for me. Watch here.

Sign-up for my free 20 day devotional, The Word Before Work Foundations, at http://TWBWFoundations.com And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth. (John 1:14)I ended last week’s devotional with a question: If the gospel compels us to “redeem our time” (see Ephesians 5:16), where can we look for practical wisdom as to how to manage our time well? That question brings us to the fifth and final truth of this series: By studying the life of Christ, we can know how God would manage his time.I know, this is a wild idea, so give me a minute to unpack it.John 1:14 tells us that God, the author of time, “became flesh” in the person of Jesus Christ. During his time on earth, Jesus was 100% God and 100% man, meaning that he experienced the same day-to-day challenges as other mortals. He had a business to run, a mother and father to care for, hunger to manage, and the need for sleep. Oh yeah, and he faced the same twenty-four-hour time constraint as every other human being.OK Jordan, Jesus had a finite amount of time on earth. But surely the demands on his time can’t compare to what we experience today, can they? Absolutely they can! Pastor Kevin DeYoung says that “If Jesus were alive today, he’d get more e-mails than any of us. He’d have people calling his cell all the time….Jesus did not float above the fray, untouched by the pressures of normal human existence.” DeYoung’s words bring to mind Hebrews 4:15 which says that “we do not have a high priest who is unable to empathize with our weaknesses.” In the person of Jesus, the Word became flesh, ensuring he could empathize with all of our weaknesses, including our efforts to steward 24 hours each day.OK Jordan, but do the gospels really have anything to say about how Jesus spent his time on earth? Now we’re getting somewhere! Yes, they do—quite a bit in fact. But in order to see it, we must adjust the lens through which we read the gospels.Pastor John Mark Comer has written extensively about how modern Christians read the gospels almost exclusively for their theology and ethics. “We read [the gospels] as cute sermon illustrations or allegorical pick-me-ups or theological gold mines,” Comer says. “…not bad, but we often miss the proverbial forest for the trees. [The gospels] are biographies.”And what do biographies show us? The lifestyle and habits of their subjects. The gospel biographies are our opportunity to see not just what Jesus said or what he did but how he walked, so that we can walk through life and manage our time the way he did. OK Jordan, then how did Jesus walk? How did he manage his time? That is the question we will explore in the next series here on The Word Before Work which kicks off next Monday. Trust me, you won’t want to miss it!

Sign-up for my free 20 day devotional, The Word Before Work Foundations, at http://TWBWFoundations.com For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God—not by works, so that no one can boast. For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do. (Ephesians 2:8-10)Over the past few weeks, we’ve explored three biblical truths about time and productivity:Truth #1: Our longing for timelessness is good and God-givenTruth #2: Sin has ensured we will all die with unfinished symphoniesTruth #3: God will finish the work we leave unfinishedBut here’s the thing: Even though God doesn’t need us to be productive (see Truth #3), we often need ourselves to be productive in order to feel a sense of self-worth. So before we go any further, I want you to stop and let this truth sink in: The gospel frees us from the need to be productive. The good news of the gospel is that “while we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8). And because we did nothing to earn his grace, there is nothing we can do to lose it. No matter how productive you are in this life, your status as an adopted child of God will never ever change. In the words of the great preacher, Martyn Lloyd-Jones, “A Christian is something before [they do] anything.”Ironically, it’s that truth that leads us to be wildly productive. Why? Because working to earn someone’s favor is exhausting. But working in response to unconditional favor is intoxicating. Once you realize that God accepts you no matter how productive you are in this life, you want to be productive for his agenda as a loving act of worship.This is what the apostle Paul was getting at in Ephesians 5. After expounding upon the gospel of grace in Ephesians chapters 1-4, Paul reminds us of our status as “dearly loved children” of God in Ephesians 5:1. What is our response to our adoption as sons and daughters of God? Paul answers that question in Ephesians 5:15-16: “See then that you walk circumspectly, not as fools but as wise, redeeming the time, because the days are evil.”Paul is saying that part of our response to the gospel is to “redeem the time”—to manage our time as carefully and wisely as possible. In other words, the gospel is our ultimate source of both rest and ambition.The question now is straightforward: Where can we look for practical wisdom as to how to redeem our time? The answer is to God’s Word generally, but more specifically to the life of Christ—the eternal God who became a time-bound human being. More on that truth next week!

Sign-up for my free 20 day devotional, The Word Before Work Foundations, at http://TWBWFoundations.com Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more….And he who was seated on the throne said, “Behold, I am making all things new.” Also he said, “Write this down, for these words are trustworthy and true.” (Revelation 21:1, 5)Over the past two weeks, we’ve seen that 1) our longing for timelessness is good and God-given, but that 2) sin has ensured we will all die with “unfinished symphonies.”Where’s the hope? Our hope is found in Jesus Christ walking out of the tomb that first Easter morning with a redeemed body that could not be destroyed again. The resurrection was Jesus’s way of declaring that our longing for immortality has been right all along and that through him, we too can experience eternal life. But Easter wasn’t just the beginning of eternal life. Easter marked the inauguration of God’s eternal kingdom which God alone will finish when he brings heaven to earth to make “all things new” (Revelation 21:5). So, if Jesus is coming back to finish his kingdom, why does it matter what you and I do in the present? Why do we care about managing our time well today? Because God has invited you and me to co-labor with him to build for his eternal kingdom (see 1 Corinthians 15:58)! That is what Paul is saying in 1 Corinthians 3:9 when he calls us “God’s fellow workers.” Our work matters today because it is a means of glorifying God and serving others. But our work also matters for eternity because God can use it to build his kingdom. But because God alone will finish that work and consummate the marriage between heaven and earth, we can embrace this freeing truth today: God doesn’t need you or me to finish our to-do lists. If the things on our to-do lists are on God’s to-do list, he will complete them with or without us. God is directing a master narrative for the world and you and I are just one of billions of actors in that story. In his great grace and wisdom, he has given us exactly as much time as we need to participate in that grand drama and work towards his kingdom. Not a moment more. Not a moment less. In the words of Job, “A person’s days are determined; you have decreed the number of his months and have set limits he cannot exceed” (Job 14:5). Thank God for those limits that ensure that he alone will get the glory for finishing the work we leave unfinished.

Sign-up for my free 20 day devotional, The Word Before Work Foundations, at http://TWBWFoundations.com To Adam he said, “Because you listened to your wife and ate fruit from the tree about which I commanded you, ‘You must not eat from it,’ “Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat food from it all the days of your life. It will produce thorns and thistles for you, and you will eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return.” (Genesis 3:17-19)We’re in a series exploring 5 biblical truths about time and productivity. Last week, we saw Truth #1: That our longing for timelessness is good and God-given. Today’s passage reveals Truth #2: That while we still long for timelessness, sin has ensured we will all die with unfinished work.When sin entered the world, death was ushered in alongside it. Human beings, who were created to be immortal, became mortal. Work, which was created to be good, became difficult. Time, which was created to be infinite, became finite. In short, sin has ensured that nobody will ever finish the work they envision completing in their lifetime. Karl Rahner, a prominent twentieth-century theologian, said it this way: “In the torment of the insufficiency of everything attainable, we learn that ultimately in this world there is no finished symphony.”Haunting, depressing, and so so true. We will all die with unfinished symphonies. Our to-do lists will never be completed. There will always be a gap between what we can imagine accomplishing in this life and what we can actually get done. Quite an encouraging devotional, huh? But don’t quit this series just yet! I promise great hope is right around the corner, but we have to start here because our grieving over the finiteness of time is the clue that gets us to that hope. How so? C.S. Lewis answered that question when he famously said, “If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.”So, if we long to accomplish more than what sin will allow us to in one lifetime, it’s logical to assume that we were made for a different, timeless story. And that is precisely what the Christian narrative is all about—that while it may appear that we will all die with unfinished symphonies, ultimately this is just an illusion as “God is able to bring eternal results from our time-bound efforts” (to yet again quote Jen Wilkin). That is the hope we will turn to next week!

Sign-up for my free 20 day devotional, The Word Before Work Foundations, at http://TWBWFoundations.com He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart; yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end. (Ecclesiastes 3:11)Deep in our bones, we know that we were created to live forever. It’s why we are drawn to stories like Narnia and Frozen in which death is ultimately a lie.But we don’t just long to live forever, we also long to be productive forever. Now, we don’t feel like this every day. Sin has made work and our efforts to be productive difficult. But something in our souls (and God’s Word) shows us that work was meant to be very good (see Genesis 1 and 2).I think we have all caught glimpses of what work must have been like prior to the Fall. You deliver a killer sales pitch and feel completely in your element. Or finish writing a great chapter and can’t wait to share it with your spouse. Or hammer the last nail into a table and step back and admire your creation with healthy pride. If you’ve experienced even just one of these moments, you know what it feels like to want work like that to last forever. You don’t want it to end because we all know that we were put on this earth to do something—to “make a mark” towards some end. Arthur Miller said it best in Death of a Salesman when he wrote that our desire “to leave a thumbprint somewhere on the world” is a “need greater than hunger or sex or thirst…A need for immortality, and by admitting it, the knowing that one has carefully inscribed one’s name on a cake of ice on a hot July day.”All of this brings us to the first of five truths we’ll see in this series: Our longing for timelessness is good and God-given. Ecclesiastes 3:11 makes this crystal clear, saying that God has “set eternity in the human heart.” In the words of Jen Wilkin, “God…has given time-bound humans a longing for timelessness.”This is one of the main themes of the musical Hamilton. Summarizing what he wants out of life, Alexander says, “I wanna build something that’s gonna outlive me.” But Alexander’s wife, Eliza, can’t understand her husband’s need for immortality. She urges her husband to “Just stay alive, that would be enough.”But we all know that’s not enough. We know that we weren’t created just to stay alive and get through life. Something in our God-designed DNA tells us that we were made for something more. To be human is to work with time that our minds tell us is finite, but that our souls assure us shouldn’t be finite. So why is time finite? That’s the question we’ll answer next week!

Sign-up for my free 20 day devotional, The Word Before Work Foundations, at http://TWBWFoundations.com Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light. (Matthew 11:28-30)As we’ve seen over the past few weeks, trusting is the difficult yet simple act of recognizing that we are not responsible for producing results through our work—God is. Once we understand that, it is certainly right to “hustle,” to, as the Apostle Paul said, “strenuously contend with all the energy” we have for the glory of God and the good of others (see Colossians 1:29).The tension between trusting and hustling isn’t meant to be resolved. It is meant to be embraced. How do you know if you are embracing that tension well? I’d argue that the best indicator is whether or not you can rest.Are you unwilling to close your laptop or stop checking email late into the night? Are you unable to sleep because your mind is trying to solve problems that await you at work in the morning? Are you resistant to the idea of taking a day or a few hours to Sabbath and simply enjoy the Lord and his good gifts?If you answered “yes” to any of those questions (and let’s face it, who hasn’t?), then that may be an indication that you have fallen for the lie that you are producing results in your work.If that’s you, take a moment to remember Jesus’s words in Matthew 11:30: Through him, our “burden is light.” That doesn’t mean our work isn’t hard! So long as we live in a fallen world, “thorns and thistles” will ensure our work will be arduous. But the burden on our souls will be light if our hustle and hard work is accompanied by an even greater disposition of trust in the Lord’s provision.But let’s face it: On the trust/hustle spectrum, most of us overcompensate towards hustling. If that’s you, how practically can you hustle less and trust more? Let me suggest three things.First, regularly immerse yourself in the Scriptures we’ve explored throughout this series.Second, take a minute right now to pray to the Lord and recognize that you are powerless to produce results in your own strength.And finally, rest. Shut your laptop down. Put your phone to bed before you hit the sack. Practice Sabbath for an hour or a day this week. Experience the lightening of the burden Jesus promised you.At the end of the day, rest is the best way I know how to remind myself of the truth we’ve explored throughout this series: Our job is faithfulness. God’s job is fruitfulness.Be faithful in your work today. Do it well. Do it “with all your heart, as working for the Lord” (Colossians 3:23). And then rest knowing that the results aren’t in your hands. They are in the hands of Almighty God who knows which results are best for you and his glory.

Sign-up for my free 20 day devotional, The Word Before Work Foundations, at http://TWBWFoundations.com The Lord will fight for you; you need only to be still. (Exodus 14:14)This verse is one of the most frequently quoted by proponents of the “Let go and let God” philosophy of life. But the context of this verse completely undermines this thinking.The Israelites are standing at the edge of the Red Sea about to be obliterated by the Egyptians who are rushing in to take God’s people back into slavery. That’s when Moses utters the words of Exodus 14:14: “The Lord will fight for you; you need only to be still.”Watch what happens next: “Then the Lord said to Moses…Tell the Israelites to move on. Raise your staff and stretch out your hand over the sea to divide the water so that the Israelites can go through the sea on dry ground” (Exodus 14:15-16).So, immediately after Moses essentially says, “Let go and let God, trust him and be still,” God says, “Move on,” get going, the Egyptians are about to destroy you!And you can only imagine how fast God’s people moved! The Egyptians were on their tails while enormous towers of the untameable sea rose on their right and their left. I’m guessing the Israelites gave new meaning to the word “hustle” that day.And we all know the rest of the story: God in his great grace delivered his people across the great sea so they could serve him.Last week, we saw that God alone produces results in our work, leading us to an uncommon level of trust in him. But today, we see more clearly how God’s Word instructs us to marry that trust with a healthy dose of hustle and hard work.With the full context of Exodus 14 in view, we can understand Moses’s call for the people to “be still” to be a stillness of their hearts and souls, not their hands and feet. It would have been the height of absurdity for the Israelites to verbalize their trust in God and not trust in their God-given legs to hustle across the floor of the Red Sea.Trusting doesn’t mean “letting go and letting God.” Trust is meant to be accompanied by hard work because we believe that God often produces results through our hustle. This is likely why Scripture continually commands us to work hard (see Colossians 3:23, Jeremiah 48:10, Colossians 1:29, 1 Corinthians 15:10, and 1 Thessalonians 5:12-13, just to name a few).We are called to trust God to produce fruit through our work, while simultaneously recognizing that more often than not, it is through our faithfulness and hustle that he chooses to deliver that fruit. Trusting God and working hard are not mutually exclusive. They are ideas meant to be held in a healthy tension. How do we know if we are managing that tension well? That’s the question we will explore next week.

Sign-up for my free 20 day devotional, The Word Before Work Foundations, at http://TWBWFoundations.com You may say to yourself, “My power and the strength of my hands have produced this wealth for me.” But remember the Lord your God, for it is he who gives you the ability to produce wealth. (Deuteronomy 8:17-18)You’ll likely see the fruit of today’s work fairly quickly. You’ll sit down at your laptop, and an hour later you’ll have a finished PowerPoint and be ready for your meeting. Or you’ll scrub in for surgery, and a few hours later your patient will be sewn up as good as new. At a minimum, you’ll go to work today, and within a couple of weeks, money will appear in your bank account as a recognition of your hard work.With such a seemingly direct connection between our work and the results of our work, it can be easy to believe that it is our intellect, skill, and “hustle,” that is producing these results. But as today’s passage reveals, ultimately it is God alone who produces fruit in our endeavors. David echoed this truth in 1 Chronicles 29:12 when he prayed, “Wealth and honor come from you alone, for you rule over everything. Power and might are in your hand, and at your discretion people are made great and given strength.”But it’s not just wealth that comes from the Lord. In 2 Corinthians 3:5, Paul says that even “our competence comes from God,” and in Romans 11:36 he asserts that “from [God] and through him…are all things.” Paul is saying that it’s not just what we see God creating in Genesis 1 that is from him. “All things,” including the results you and I produce at work today, are from the Lord.Thus, we can join with the Psalmist in saying that “Some trust in chariots and some in horses, but we trust in the name of the Lord our God” (Psalm 20:7). Because all things are “from him and through him,” we don’t ultimately trust in chariots or horses, P&L statements or software, intellect or hustle. “We trust in the name of the Lord” because he alone is able to produce fruit through our work.But this doesn’t negate the need for us to be faithful to work hard with the skills and opportunities God has given us to steward. As we’ll see next week, it is often our hustle that God uses as a primary means of producing fruitful results in our work.

Sign-up for my free 20 day devotional, The Word Before Work Foundations, at http://TWBWFoundations.com What, after all, is Apollos? And what is Paul? Only servants, through whom you came to believe—as the Lord has assigned to each his task. I planted the seed, Apollos watered it, but God has been making it grow. So neither the one who plants nor the one who waters is anything, but only God, who makes things grow. (1 Corinthians 3:5-7)I was recently reading Gospelbound by the editors of The Gospel Coalition when I came across these words from John Piper: “My job is faithfulness. God’s is fruitfulness.”I can’t tell you how many times I have shared that quote in the past couple of months. It so beautifully encapsulates an idea I have written about many times before—namely that Christ-followers ought to have a unique relationship with the word “hustle.”Let me explain.The rise of the increasingly dominant “hustle culture” has been well documented for years now. The idea is that if you want things to happen in your career, you have to hustle and make them happen!As we’ll see throughout this series, there are tons of passages of Scripture that command us to work hard—to hustle if you will. This is a point of commonality we can celebrate with our hustle-loving friends, Christian or not. But here’s where Christ-followers ought to diverge significantly from the hustle culture masses. While we embrace the biblical command to work hard, we simultaneously recognize that it is God alone who produces results in our work. As Paul says in today’s passage, we can “plant” and “water” all we want, but at the end of the day it is “only God who makes things grow.”The fourth chapter of Nehemiah offers us a concrete picture of what this looks like. Nehemiah’s opponents were gearing up for an attack to stop God’s people from rebuilding Jerusalem’s walls. What did Nehemiah and company do in response? Nehemiah says, “We prayed to our God AND posted a guard day and night to meet this threat” (Nehemiah 4:9). In other words, they trusted in God and hustled to work to protect themselves.As Christians, we have a unique responsibility to embrace the tension between trusting in God to produce fruit through our work and faithfully hustling in accordance with his commands. How do we embrace that tension well? That’s the question we’ll explore over the next few weeks.