Colossians 3:23 “Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as for the Lord, not for men.”
Some people believe all Christians are born equal, but ‘full-time’ Christians are born more equal than others. What do you think?
We need to completely reject that way of viewing things. All vocations are equal, and so-called ‘secular work’ is a vocation. The Bible doesn’t differentiate between the physical and spiritual parts of human life in the same way that we tend to, and God doesn’t distinguish or compartmentalize ‘work’ and ‘worship’ – indeed the Hebrew words for both ‘work’ and ‘worship’ are derived from the same root.
One cannot overestimate the insidious effect that such a misrepresentation of the validity of ‘secular’ work has had on committed believers. Mark Greene highlights the danger, saying that “the impact on Christians of effectively robbing their work of spiritual and ministry value is to produce a sense of guilt. The working Christian comes home at the end of a fifty-hour week and thinks, ‘I haven’t done any evangelism. I haven’t done any ministry. I’m not serving God. I must make time outside work to do all these things, otherwise I’m not leading an obedient Christian life’. So perhaps he or she gets involved in neighbourhood evangelism, or accepts the invitation to serve on whichever committee, and tries to squeeze a hundred commitments into a seven-day week. The result can simply be exhaustion and discouragement”.
In seeking to be disciples of Jesus, our aim is to live in any and every situation as he would live if he were us. It’s not what I do, but how I do it. Otherwise, if my job isn’t a supposedly ‘full-time’ one, then I’ll be spending a large proportion of my waking hours excluding Jesus’ relevance and primacy in it. Thankfully that is not the case.
Lord, I choose to sign up: full-time, whole-hearted, single-mindedly yours, in whatever task you assign to me in this world. Amen!
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