The Word Before Work

Sign-up for my free 20 day devotional, The Word Before Work Foundations, at http://TWBWFoundations.com Therefore, I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God—this is your true and proper worship. Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will. (Romans 12:1-2)Long before he zipped up a cardigan sweater and became Mister Rogers, Fred Rogers was a young man who loved Jesus and was eager to discern his calling. Throughout his childhood and adolescence, Rogers had many interests and talents, including music, puppetry, and children’s education. The question in Rogers’s mind was how he could combine these different gifts in a single opportunity to best serve others.Dr. Junlei Li, the former co-director of The Fred Rogers Center, explains that “Fred was guided by a deep sense of service, of wanting to be useful to the world. He was driven by service even if in his mind it was vague for years as to how to best leverage his considerable talents in service of others.” Fred Rogers embodied Romans 12:1, deeply understanding that as Christians, the gospel of Jesus’s selfless sacrifice should compel us to view our whole lives as service to others. When it comes to our work, the proper response to the gospel is not to seek out the work that will earn us the most fame and fortune. The goal should be to find the work we can do most exceptionally well in service of God and others. In the words of Rogers himself, “You don’t set out to be rich and famous; you set out to be helpful.” As Rogers’s biographer points out, this “relentless sense of service to God drove every moment of Fred Rogers’s life,” especially in how he thought about his work.But how would he serve? Where was Rogers being called to put his gifts to work for the glory of God and the good of others? These were the questions Rogers grappled with for many years.Rogers had a term he loved to use when referring to discerning one’s calling. He called it “guided drift.” The idea was that, while it is good and wise to make plans, “one needed to live a life that was open to change,” led by the Holy Spirit. As Rogers was wrapping up college in the spring of 1951, he was planning a career in pastoral ministry, as this was how he thought he could be of utmost service to others. But just before starting seminary, Rogers saw television for the first time. As we’ll see next week, this seminal moment produced a major jolt to Rogers’s guided drift, setting him down a path to creating one of the most influential pieces of culture of the 20th Century—a TV show that would make Christian values attractive to millions of children.

Sign-up for my free 20 day devotional, The Word Before Work Foundations, at http://TWBWFoundations.com Yet the news about him spread all the more, so that crowds of people came to hear him and to be healed of their sicknesses. But Jesus often withdrew to lonely places and prayed. (Luke 5:15-16)For the past few weeks, we have been studying when and why Jesus said “no,” while drawing out applications for our own lives today. In this final entry in this series, we’re looking at the most common thing Jesus said “no” to during his time on earth: the relentless human demands for more.All throughout the New Testament, we see people clamoring for more of Jesus: more of his healing, more of his miracles, more of his teaching, and most of all, more of his time. But over and over again, Jesus said “no,” choosing instead to withdraw to “lonely places” to pray and to rest. Today’s passage is just one of dozens of nearly identical moments in the gospels in which Jesus turned his back on the demands for more. When you view these verses in their entirety, you see that Jesus had a staggering amount of margin in his work and very little sense of urgency. This insight becomes even more compelling when you consider the fact that Jesus knew in his early thirties that his death was imminent.So, given his limited time on earth, why wasn’t Jesus in more of a hurry? Why was he so consistent in saying “no” to demands on his time and energy? I think there are three reasons. First, Jesus needed communion with the Father. Many times, when the gospel writers tell us Jesus went away to a solitary place, it also tells us that he went away to pray. Secondly, being both fully God and fully man, Jesus needed rest (see Mark 6:31-32). But I think there’s a third reason why Jesus said “no” so frequently. I think Jesus wanted to model what healthy work looks like for us, whose lives look so very different from the One we say we follow.Unlike Jesus, our lives have such little margin today. We are addicted to the idea of more. We have fallen for one of the enemy’s greatest lies: that more activity, more roles, more commitments, and more responsibility equals more impact. Here, Jesus offers a better way. In order to do our most exceptional work and live our most engaged lives, we need to get in the habit of creating boundaries around our time, saying “no” to the relentless demands that we do more faster. We need to more closely align our lives with the example of Jesus, whose model encourages us to say “no” far more often for our own good, for the glory of God, and for the good of others.

Sign-up for my free 20 day devotional, The Word Before Work Foundations, at http://TWBWFoundations.com Then some boats from Tiberias landed near the place where the people had eaten the bread after the Lord had given thanks. Once the crowd realized that neither Jesus nor his disciples were there, they got into the boats and went to Capernaum in search of Jesus. When they found him on the other side of the lake, they asked him, “Rabbi, when did you get here?” Jesus answered, “Very truly I tell you, you are looking for me, not because you saw the signs I performed but because you ate the loaves and had your fill. Do not work for food that spoils, but for food that endures to eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you.” (John 6:23-27)In this series, we are exploring a few of the many instances in which Jesus said “no” in order to unpack what our Savior’s example means for us and our work.In today’s passage, we find the crowd who had witnessed Jesus’s miraculous feeding of the five thousand, chasing him down the next day in search for more bread and fish. Before they can even utter their request, Jesus steps in and says “no,” refusing their request for more food. Jesus isn’t being lazy or maliciously withholding. He says “no” in order to offer the people something better. While the people came to ask Jesus for bread for the day, Jesus said “no” in order to offer the Bread “that endures to eternal life.”There are two applications I see from Jesus’s gracious “no” in this passage. First, as so many of us have likely experienced, sometimes God says “no” to our own requests in order to sanctify us or prepare us for something better. We are all so fond of quoting Romans 8:28 which promises that “in all things God works for the good of those who love him,” but we forget that sometimes, what is best for us is for the Lord to say “no” to our prayers. Is there something you’re asking God to do that just isn’t happening? The Lord may be using that “no” to refine your character or draw you closer to him.The second application I see in this passage is that Jesus’s example should inspire us to say “no” in order to offer something better to those we serve. My kids ask for donuts almost every day. I say “no” most days in order to offer them something better (a longer life without diabetes). This principle plays out in the workplace all the time. When your boss asks you to attend a meeting that you know will be a waste of your time, the most gracious thing for you to do might be respectfully saying “no” to the invitation so you can focus on excelling at the project the boss wants completed by the end of this week. Or, when a customer demands that you build a certain feature into your product which you know won’t solve their problem, it is actually kind of you to say “no,” bringing your knowledge and experience to bear to say “yes” to a more effective solution.Just as in Jesus’s encounter above, sometimes a polite but firm “no” can be one of the kindest and most generous things we can do in order to serve others better.

Sign-up for my free 20 day devotional, The Word Before Work Foundations, at http://TWBWFoundations.com Jesus left the synagogue and went to the home of Simon. Now Simon’s mother-in-law was suffering from a high fever, and they asked Jesus to help her. So he bent over her and rebuked the fever, and it left her. She got up at once and began to wait on them. At sunset, the people brought to Jesus all who had various kinds of sickness, and laying his hands on each one, he healed them. Moreover, demons came out of many people, shouting, “You are the Son of God!” But he rebuked them and would not allow them to speak, because they knew he was the Messiah. At daybreak, Jesus went out to a solitary place. The people were looking for him and when they came to where he was, they tried to keep him from leaving them. But he said, “I must proclaim the good news of the kingdom of God to the other towns also, because that is why I was sent.” And he kept on preaching in the synagogues of Judea. (Luke 4:38-44)As we saw last week, Jesus was crystal clear on what his mission was, or in Jesus’s words, the work the Father gave him to do (John 17:4). Jesus came to earth to “proclaim the good news” of salvation in word and ultimate deed on the cross. And all throughout the gospels, we see Jesus saying “no” to demands on his time that didn’t fit in line with the “yes” he had already given to this mission from the Father.Here in Luke 4, we see one of the clearest examples of Jesus’s disciplined adherence to his mission. After leaving the synagogue, Jesus had healed Peter’s mother-in-law. As word got out about Jesus’s miracle, the town flocked to him, bringing their sick so that Jesus could make them well. This, of course, is one way in which Jesus was fulfilling his mission, by demonstrating that he was God incarnate. But after his healing spree, we see Jesus retreat “to a solitary place.” Jesus knew that, after the first round of healings, there would be demands for more. But when the people predictably showed up for a healing encore the next day, Jesus said “no” to the peoples’ request. Why? Jesus explained, “I must proclaim the good news of the kingdom of God to the other towns also, because that is why I was sent” [emphasis mine].Yes, healing was a part of fulfilling Jesus’s mission. But it was only that—a part. Jesus knew that there was more important work for him to do, namely “proclaiming the good news” by “preaching in the synagogues” in preparation for the Passion on the cross.When you’re building a company, writing a book, or managing a big project at work, there are many different things you have to complete in order to accomplish your mission. But that doesn’t mean that all of those tasks are equally important or should garner as much of your personal time and attention. It’s easy for everything to look important at work. But in reality, few things really are. Take a moment to discern the truly essential thing you need to accomplish this week in pursuit of your God-given mission, and say “no” to as much as you can that falls outside of that most critical task.

Sign-up for my free 20 day devotional, The Word Before Work Foundations, at http://TWBWFoundations.com As Jesus and his disciples were on their way, he came to a village where a woman named Martha opened her home to him. She had a sister called Mary, who sat at the Lord’s feet listening to what he said. But Martha was distracted by all the preparations that had to be made. She came to him and asked, “Lord, don’t you care that my sister has left me to do the work by myself? Tell her to help me!” “Martha, Martha,” the Lord answered, “you are worried and upset about many things, but few things are needed—or indeed only one. Mary has chosen what is better, and it will not be taken away from her.” (Luke 10:38-42)In this passage, we see Jesus clearly saying “no”—not to something that is being asked of Him, but to Martha’s busyness. Martha, it appears, was much like us today, busy spreading herself across many things while failing to take the time to discern the most essential thing. In this scene, we see her multitasking, trying to prepare a meal and also trying to spend time with Jesus, while her sister Mary sat with singular focus at the Teacher’s feet.Martha, understandably perturbed, asks Jesus to step in and encourage Mary to help with the preparations. But Jesus says “no.” Why? He says that while Martha is worried about “many things…few things are needed—or indeed only one. Mary has chosen what is better.” In other words, Jesus said “no” because Martha wasn’t focused on what mattered most. In that moment, the most essential thing was not cooking another dish or cleaning up the house—it was sitting at the feet of Jesus. Commenting on this passage, Dr. Timothy Keller said, “[Mary] decided what was important, and she did not let the day-to-day get her away from that. As a result, she was drawn into a greatness we don’t even dream of. Because we are more like Martha than Mary, we’re sinking in a sea of mediocrity.”The world is constantly pressuring us to be more like Martha than Mary, convincing us that the path to happiness and impact is in saying “yes” to more commitments, more jobs, and more responsibility. But here, Jesus offers us a better, simpler, saner way. He offers us the gift of saying “no” to the relatively unimportant in order to focus on the essential. He is offering us the path of less but better. “Few things are needed … indeed only one.”It’s important to note that Jesus wasn’t asking Martha (or us for that matter) to do anything he hadn’t. Jesus was crystal clear on what his one essential thing was (preaching the gospel in preparation for the Passion he would perform on the cross) and he pursued that mission with relentless focus. Just before this exchange with Mary and Martha, we are told in Luke 9:51 that Jesus had “set his face to go to Jerusalem.” Once Jesus was clear on his mission—what he was saying “yes” to—he got in the habit of saying “no” to the many nonessential things along the way. As you and I gain clarity on what is essential in our business and lives, we must do the same.

Sign-up for my free 20 day devotional, The Word Before Work Foundations, at http://TWBWFoundations.com One Sabbath Jesus was going through the grainfields, and as his disciples walked along, they began to pick some heads of grain. The Pharisees said to him, “Look, why are they doing what is unlawful on the Sabbath?” He answered, “Have you never read what David did when he and his companions were hungry and in need? In the days of Abiathar the high priest, he entered the house of God and ate the consecrated bread, which is lawful only for priests to eat. And he also gave some to his companions.” Then he said to them, “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. So the Son of Man is Lord even of the Sabbath.” (Mark 2:23-28)Last week, we saw how Jesus reframed the idea of Sabbath-rest as a gift to be enjoyed, rather than a law to be obeyed. So, if Sabbath was, in the words of Jesus, “made for man,” (Mark 2:27), the question becomes, what does man need? As we saw in the first week of this series, we need an antidote to restlessness, namely regularly exchanging life-sucking things for life-giving things, practicing thankfulness, and reminding ourselves of how Jesus’s work on the cross frees us from the pressure to work ourselves into the ground.How and when we go about doing these things is going to look different from person to person. With Jesus as the new covenant, we are no longer locked in to a particular day of the week to rest from our restlessness. You can “Sabbath” or rest every night after you lay your kids down for bed, or on an annual summer vacation, or, as tradition would have it, on a set day each week.My family and I embrace the gift of a Sabbath-like rest every Sunday, when we attempt to only do things that are “life-giving” and try as best as we can to cease all striving and productivity. For us, that looks like staying off of our phones, eating our favorite foods, spending more time in God’s Word, and enjoying time with our closest family and friends. But the most restful thing for me is that for one day, we intentionally suspend any productive conversation. That means no talking out ideas for my next book, no planning our next vacation, and no discussing calendars for the upcoming week. For one day, as best as we can, we simply rest and appreciate the good things, work, and people God has given us—not striving for anything more.As my wife and I began to practice Sabbath a few years ago, it quickly became clear why Jesus said the Sabbath is for man and not the other way around. The Sabbath is an opportunity to rest from the relentless pressure of the world to constantly be accomplishing, solving, entertaining, spending, posting, and doing. It is a day to look at our life, our work, and the cross and say with great contentment, “This is enough!”This type of rest doesn’t come easy for me. Not even close. But the more I practice these regular breaks, the less restless and anxious I become. If you’re restless like me, I’d encourage you to hear Jesus telling you that Sabbath-like rest is for you. It is no longer a legalistic command. It is a gift that is more relevant today than ever before. I pray you will embrace it.

Sign-up for my free 20 day devotional, The Word Before Work Foundations, at http://TWBWFoundations.com At that time Jesus went through the grainfields on the Sabbath. His disciples were hungry and began to pick some heads of grain and eat them. When the Pharisees saw this, they said to him, “Look! Your disciples are doing what is unlawful on the Sabbath.” He answered, “Haven’t you read what David did when he and his companions were hungry? He entered the house of God, and he and his companions ate the consecrated bread—which was not lawful for them to do, but only for the priests. Or haven’t you read in the Law that the priests on Sabbath duty in the temple desecrate the Sabbath and yet are innocent? I tell you that something greater than the temple is here. If you had known what these words mean, ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice,’ you would not have condemned the innocent. For the Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath.” (Matthew 12:1-8)Last week, we established that the solution to our restlessness can be found in Sabbath-like rest from the sources of our restlessness. Next week, we will look at how practically we as Christians do that in the 21st Century. But first, we must look at what Sabbath is not for today’s Christian. And the best place to start is the origins of Sabbath itself.When God handed down the Ten Commandments to Moses at Mount Sinai, he commanded that the Israelites rest on the seventh day of each week. This was meant to be a sign of God’s covenant with His people. And, of course, Sabbath was modeled after God’s own day of rest from the work of creation on the first seventh day.In the Old Testament, the Sabbath was observed with strict rules and regulations. For example, the Israelites were prohibited from lighting fires (Exodus 35:3), gathering food (Exodus 16:23-29), and selling goods in the marketplace (Nehemiah 10:31). And the punishment for intentionally violating the Sabbath was nothing short of death (Exodus 31:14-15).Over time, the Israelites took the Sabbath to its most legalistic extremes, to the point in which, by the time Jesus came to earth, they even viewed healing on the Sabbath as a sin. When the Pharisees saw Jesus healing and picking grains in a field on the Sabbath in Matthew 12, they confronted him, calling out his seeming unlawfulness. Jesus responded by proclaiming “the Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath” (Matthew 12:8) signaling that a new covenant was here in the person of Christ. In Mark’s account of the same events, Jesus is recorded as saying that “Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath” (Mark 2:27). In other words, Jesus is saying that through Him, the Sabbath is no longer a command of the Law. Instead, it is a gracious gift for the restless.What did Jesus mean that Sabbath is now for man? How, practically, can we take advantage of that gift? And how can we rest regularly today, without making our rest legalistic and life-sucking? Those are the questions we will seek to answer next week.

Sign-up for my free 20 day devotional, The Word Before Work Foundations, at http://TWBWFoundations.com Then you will experience God’s peace, which exceeds anything we can understand. His peace will guard your hearts and minds as you live in Christ Jesus. (Philippians 4:7)Your phone is blowing up. Your calendar is out of control. Your to-do list feels never-ending. Your mind won’t stop racing. And when you wake up in the morning, you’re immediately confronted with the subtle hum of anxiety that follows you throughout the day.Sound familiar? Today, more than ever before, we are restless. I would argue there are three major factors contributing to the restlessness of today’s Christian. First, we (like the rest of the world) are spending so much time consuming entertainment, social media, apps, and games, that these good things that were meant to be life-giving have actually become life-sucking. Second, we aren’t taking the time to “enter [the Lord’s] gates with thanksgiving,” leading to discontent and a restless drive to achieve and accumulate more. And finally—and this is a particularly challenging struggle for ambitious professionals—we are failing to take the time to regularly remind ourselves of the gospel and how our identity in Christ frees us from the need to constantly do more.It may sound overly simplistic, but if our problem is restlessness, then the solution must be resting from the sources of that restlessness. In order to find true rest and peace, we must regularly break from the relentless demands of this world and our work. We must make time to simply give thanks for what God has given us, rather than always striving for more. And we must temporarily exchange the things that drain us (email, smartphones, etc.) for the things that bring us life (friends, family, God’s Word, etc.).Fortunately, the Bible has a model for this kind of rest: Sabbath. Now, up until a few years ago, Sabbath was a noun to me, not a verb. It was an ancient word for a day of the week, not something modern Christians actually practiced. For a long time, Sabbath sounded more like a legalistic chore to me than a gracious gift that would solve my restlessness. But through careful study of Jesus’s words, I have completely changed how I think about Sabbath-like rest. Now, I can’t imagine my life without it.Next week, we will look at what Sabbath is not for today’s Christian, debunking many of the myths I (and maybe you) have long held about the ancient practice. And then, in our third and final devotional in this series, we will look at what the Bible says Sabbath rest can be and what it can look like practically for us today.

Sign-up for my free 20 day devotional, The Word Before Work Foundations, at http://TWBWFoundations.com In the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, we command you, brothers and sisters, to keep away from every believer who is idle and disruptive and does not live according to the teaching you received from us. For you yourselves know how you ought to follow our example. We were not idle when we were with you, nor did we eat anyone’s food without paying for it. On the contrary, we worked night and day, laboring and toiling so that we would not be a burden to any of you. We did this, not because we do not have the right to such help, but in order to offer ourselves as a model for you to imitate. (2 Thessalonians 3:6-9)In Acts 18:1-3, we are given a front-row seat to the third and final reason why Paul appears to have chosen to work as a tentmaker: so that he could effectively disciple other Christians. In these verses, we are told that, upon arriving in Corinth, Paul met Priscilla and Aquila, “and because [Paul] was a tentmaker as they were, he stayed and worked with them” (Acts 18:3). Many theologians believe that Priscilla and Aquila had already converted to Christianity by the time they met Paul. But by working shoulder-to-shoulder as tentmakers, Paul was able to disciple the couple and bring them further along in their faith.In his book, The Missional Entrepreneur, Dr. Mark Russell, says, “It is very possible that Paul taught [Priscilla and Aquila] how to blend workplace excellence and effective evangelism. They became tentmaking missionaries themselves, traveling on to Ephesus no doubt still practicing their trade and teaching the Way to people like Apollos. Paul modeled teaching in the context of daily life, which made spiritual instruction seem natural and flowing rather than forced and uncomfortable as it is commonly perceived. Due to this style…[Paul’s] converts became teachers and their converts became teachers and the positive feedback cycle continued.”As we saw in the first week of this series, Paul didn’t work because he needed to, and he didn’t just do the bare minimum amount of work necessary in order to fund his “real ministry” of preaching within the four walls of local churches. Paul chose to work as a part of a deliberate strategy to “become all things to all people,” to preach the gospel to unbelievers in the workplace, and to disciple fellow Christians.But in 2 Thessalonians 3, Paul alludes to another reason why he worked, saying, “we worked night and day…in order to make ourselves a model for you to follow.” Through God’s Word, we can hear Paul saying those same words to us today. Whether you’re a tentmaker, an entrepreneur, an artist, a salesperson, a stay-at-home dad, a janitor, or a teacher, your work, like Paul’s, is not something separate or disconnected from the work of making disciples. The Lord has called each of us to use our chosen vocations in intentional ways to win the respect of outsiders, to preach the gospel, and to make disciples of Jesus Christ. Let that truth and Paul’s example challenge and inspire you as you go about your work today!

Sign-up for my free 20 day devotional, The Word Before Work Foundations, at http://TWBWFoundations.com It has always been my ambition to preach the gospel where Christ was not known, so that I would not be building on someone else’s foundation. (Romans 15:20)As we have been exploring throughout this devotional series, Paul chose to work as a tentmaker in conjunction with his preaching ministry for some very deliberate reasons. Last week, we saw that Paul worked in the marketplace as a means of “becoming all things to all people” and “winning the respect of outsiders.” But why was Paul so eager to win the respect of the lost? In Romans 15:20, Paul alludes to the answer, saying, “It has always been my ambition to preach the gospel where Christ was not known.” Paul worked as a tentmaker to become all things to all people so that he might increase his opportunities to preach the gospel to those who had yet to hear it.Paul’s work as a tentmaker would have allowed him to preach the gospel in two powerful ways: through his actions and his words. While the New Testament gives us a tremendous glimpse at Paul’s eloquence and ability to preach the gospel through written and spoken word, one has to imagine that Paul preached an equally powerful sermon by simply living a Christ-transformed life as he worked alongside his fellow tentmakers and tradesmen. As we know from experience, modeling Christ-like character at work is one of the most effective ways to make the gospel winsome to the lost. Paul undoubtedly understood this and leveraged the attention his character would have received to point “outsiders” to the gospel explicitly through words. As the theologian T. G. Soares once pointed out, the New Testament accounts of Paul’s ministry “suggest the constant personal evangelism that Paul must have carried on during his hours of labor with the various fellow-workers with whom he was thrown into companionship.”So, Paul clearly worked as a means of becoming “all things to all people,” and to preach the gospel in word and deed. But as we will see next week, there is one final reason why Paul chose to work as a tentmaker. As the biblical account of Priscilla and Aquila make clear, Paul also leveraged his vocation to disciple other believers, thus multiplying the spread of the gospel across the world.