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Well, let's just talk a little bit about the whole concept of work. First of all, as I have been talking with various people and have been reading, the very facts are that people are bored with their jobs, even good jobs. Christians are bored with their jobs. There are frustrations and conflicts and problems and situations that they don't really know how to handle, and when as people and industries get more, give more and more recreational time, there are Mondays and Fridays, there's still high absenteeism, more and more mechanized things that makes the, what was once laboring jobs that were fulfilling, it makes them non-fulfilling because people feel like they're being replaced.
But frankly, I have not found that a person who is in a job who, which is supposed to be fulfilling, is any more fulfilled than someone like my dad who drives a truck and who does a repetitive thing day after day. The night before last, I, I was up in the University of Colorado, and a young guy came up, and he'd been in a computer science major, and uh, he had wanted to switch because everybody was telling him it was so impersonal, and I just barely mentioned this to both a crowd of non-Christians and Christians, and into a group of Christians, and it again caught wildfire. Everybody wanted to talk about how life can be meaningful if you're working in a job.
And so, no matter where we go, it seems that the questions come up. Now, the fact is that working in a job and putting bread on the table is a matter of reality. That is where we live. We've got to do it. We have no choice if we're going to live. There is no Social Security that is going to supply for everybody if they don't work. Now, advice is, uh, worth what you usually pay for it, and that is nothing. But we're going to give a lot of advice in this course, and as we interact, and you'll get a lot of personal challenge, but it will really be of very little meaning unless you as an individual take some of these things and week by week start trying to put them into practice in your own life.
Because when you finish this whole thing, you'll basically be the same person that you were before. You'll have the same job, you'll have the same problems. So unless we're able to get down into the system of finding out how God answers some of the questions, uh, and put them into practice in our own lives, then we won't be able to do anything worthwhile. Now, if you take your Bible, please, and turn to to Mark chapter three verse fourteen. Mark chapter three verse fourteen. Verse fourteen.
Okay, in that particular passage, we find that Jesus said that he appointed twelve that they might be with him and that he might send them out to preach. Now, we could spend a great deal of time looking at how Jesus trained his own men, but one of the key things that Jesus did was that he had them with him. Jesus did not have a seminary. He taught people in the context of real life. They were in touch with the rich and the poor and, and the lame and the halt, the blind, and he did not get them off and give them an easy time. And so Jesus was always under pressure. And so one thing that I'd like to share with you this morning is the concept of living in the midst of reality where you have pressures.
If anybody ever expects to not have pressure in their life, they'll find that that'll, that'll just never be the situation. In John sixteen thirty three, it says, these things I have spoken unto you that you may have peace. In the world you will have tribulation, but take courage, I have overcome the world. Now, an interesting aspect of this particular verse is that we usually focus on that peace business. Boy, in the world you're going to have peace, and we claim peace. But the fact is that Jesus gives us a promise here and says you will have tribulation. Now, the word that is used for tribulation means pressure.
It's the same word that's used for crunching out the grapes to make wine, and it's, it's being under pressure. It is not persecution. Now, very often, when we get in a crunch in our lives, say, ooh, I'm being persecuted. Very few of us ever really undergo persecution. There's another word that can be used for persecution that if that could have been used in this gospel had they wanted to. And this word means pressure, and it's a promise. In the world, you will have pressure. Now, every one of us are in circumstances where we say, boy, just wait till next week, it'll be better, or tomorrow will be better, or when I finish school, it'll be better, or when my boss changes, it'll be better, and it never is.
No matter what happens, your job, your family, your circumstances put you under pressure. So there are probably two key things that throughout our whole time together this term that I'll want to communicate to you, and Bob will too, and that is we cannot escape either pressures or circumstances. It is impossible. There will always be pressures that are heavy, and there will always be circumstances that are adverse. Just when the things at the job get going good, you have a teenage son or a daughter, and things start getting rather wild in that respect, and conflicts ensue in, in terms of the family.
So there'll always be pressures and always be circumstances that we can't quite cope with. Now, I believe that is God's training program for getting our attention. I personally have never been in a circumstance where I did not have pressures on me. And the medal of a Christian is whether or not he or she learns to live in adverse circumstances and learns to live under heavy pressure. And I mean heavy pressure. I don't mean just little things. And I believe what God intends to do is to increase our capacity for living with unresolved circumstances and pressures that we do not particularly like.
I remember one time when I was going through jump training, I was in the Air Force, but we got to go through the Army's, um, jump training school when I taught at the Air Force Academy, and there was something about the pressure and the reality that was on you. You know, you jumped off a little two-foot tower, and then a, then a four-foot tower, and then you jumped off of a, of a fifty-foot tower, and then you came off a three hundred-foot thing or two hundred and something where they had lines. It got worse every time. And then finally they stick you in the airplane, and you're looking down at nothing. And there is something about the reality of that moment that makes all the training come to bear all in one point.
And there were guys who got up in the front of the plane and hooked their arms on something, said, I'm not going. There was another guy walking up the tower, and he froze on the, on the, uh, things that you hold on going up there, totally passed out and it didn't know he had done anything. And so, you know, the reality of the moment is the, is the proving of your training. And when you get in reality, you have to operate on the basis of faith and on the basis of what you have learned. Now, if you have not properly prepared to meet pressure and to meet adverse circumstances, it's no wonder that, that ulcers and various other things ensue in your life.
And worry takes over, and you, you fret and you stew, and, and really you try and resolve a situation that perhaps cannot be resolved. And so another thing we will realize is we must learn to live in certain kind of pressures and circumstances that may never be totally resolved as we would like them. Now, I may have jotted in these verses in Matthew, but if you read through these Ma- verses in Matthew fourteen and fifteen, you will get a picture and find out that Jesus Christ was always under pressure. Every time he tried to get his disciples off for a little fellowship and a little retreat up on the mountain, the people pressed in. They try and go down for a little picnic on the beach, and the people press in, he has to get in a boat.
Then he sends his disciples out to escape across, and while he goes off and prays, and then a storm comes up, and he walks out on the water to get them. And every time you turn around, Jesus is encountering his disciples in the midst of adverse circumstance. Now, there is a syndrome, a little illness that I would like to call the grass is greener syndrome. Now, the grass is greener syndrome is one that all of us like to plea, and that is we live on the vague and false hope that if only the circumstances would change, then everything will be okay. And the fact is, you, you, you get over on the other side of the fence where the grass looked greener, and it really wasn't.
I talked to the doctor yesterday. He'd made a move from Phoenix to up somewhere in South Idaho, and I said, well, how'd it work out? And he says, it was great. It was the, it was the right move at the wrong time. And now he's going to move again up into the state of Washington. And so he's just kind of floating through because he, he saw that his circumstance in Phoenix wasn't what right. I remember I had an appointment with him to discuss this, and he'd taken off somewhere on a vacation and didn't get back and missed the appointment. We were going to discuss in depth what he was going to do in the future. Well, he just kind of impulsively roared off and did it. And now he says that wasn't right. So see, the grass did not turn out to be any better where he was, and probably in my mind, I wonder, will it really work out where he's going to move on May fifteenth?
And all of us have to face that, because one proposition I would like to put before you is that if you cannot learn to accept and live in the circumstances, the job in which you are right now, it is seriously questionable if you will come to peace in another job. Now, just recently, I had an instance where someone changed jobs where I feel it was really right. And that's one of the things that we're going to get into in the, in our time together, is when should you actually change jobs? When should you change your circumstances? Because there are valid times to do it. But it is only valid if you've applied some steps to your own life prior to doing that, and you have made sure that you have made a go of what you are currently in right now.
There are some reasons that are absolutely invalid for changing jobs. And by the way, how many of you are housewives? Can I just see that do not? Okay, great. Because that is included as a job. In fact, it's probably the most expensive job in the whole system, and it's probably one of the hardest because it never ceases. And so the things that we're going to encounter, you can't change as easily, by the way. You know, you're stuck. That's the one job where the, the grass is greener syndrome, you know, you can't follow it. At least if you're a Christian, you ought not to. There are times that you might be tempted, but I would encourage you to hang in there.
So we want to get into a number of these issues as we go through our time. Probably the key word in looking at your circumstance is this: God's sovereignty. You are not where you are now by accident. Even if, even if you disobeyed God in a sense by coming into it, unless the job you are doing now is sin, that is, you're, you know, you're running some operation that is just plain sin, or you're causing others to sin as a result of it, and that would be an illegitimate job, and there are illegitimate jobs in the scriptures. Unless that job is sin, and even if you made a mistake in coming into the job you're in right now, you are there now by God's sovereignty, and you need to learn to live in that circumstance.
And I would like you to encourage you toward a stat- uh, a position of victory, not escape. Now, our normal way out is to escape, but I would like to help you during this time, as would Bob, to learn to live in the circumstances in which you find yourself, because that is extremely important. Okay, now let's talk about some of the problems that we run into in just putting our life together. Now, part of this is going to be the job, but I cannot give you the job part without trying to resolve certain other issues.
Now, back in December, I was going through a real struggle in my own thinking in this issue, and I remember I was back in Michigan, I was by myself where I was doing some study and some things, and uh, late one night, as I was trying to write on the issue of job fulfillment, I was struggling with the issue of what if I were a coal miner in Pennsylvania who had for twenty five years been going down in the mines, breathing that stuff, and getting this disease that they tell me that coal miners get, that I've heard of on the radio here recently. And, and, and then I read the Bible, or I come to some fancy class like this, and they say you're supposed to enjoy your job.
And I really had to struggle as to whether it was honest for me to say that you must be fulfilled in your job. Well, I'll come through with you later on in the semester, or in our term here, as to some biblical answers to that, but let me give you the answer, instead of making you wait all that time, that I personally came to, and that is no. You may not be fulfilled totally in your job. There may be jobs that in and of themselves are not fulfilling. And the reason I came to this is I, as I went into the scriptures, it did not say that. The second thing, the scriptures do not treat the job by itself or your work, but it treats a combination of basically three things, and that is your job, your family, and your ministry.
Okay, now we'll have to get used to this term ministry because I'm going to use it frequently during our time. I personally believe that every Christian has a job and then has some family responsibilities and has a ministry. Now, by ministry, I don't mean preaching in the pulpit, but that is you have a group of people that your life affects, and God has put you in a particular place for the purpose of affecting their lives and influencing them for God. And so it's in that combination that we are commanded to have fulfillment.
Now, one of our problems is that we may look for total fulfillment in only one of those. The person who looks for fulfillment only in ministry, but yet has a job, is spending somewhere in the neighborhood of thirty five percent of his life not enjoying himself and not feeling like he's doing anything. Yeah. Do you have any priorities on these three areas? Yes, and we will get into that. There are some priorities. They're not, it's not mechanical click, click, click, but there are priorities as to where they fit, and they vary. Sometimes the job will be top priority. It was like a student that I talked to on, on Thursday night, and she was in student teaching, and she was deeply involved in a student ministry at the University of Colorado, and she couldn't get time to do her preparation.
I said, you're going to have to slow down ministry and do your job, which is out in the student teaching, for a period of time. There's been a period of time in my own life. I remember one time where I took two months where I did nothing but my job. I mean, I ignored everything else, and it was on Ju- ba- started about July fourth and worked straight till through to the end of August, and only did the job and slept. It was hard, and it was miserable and all that stuff, but it was necessary to reach a particular goal and to finish something. And so I prayed and got, we felt we had direction to do that, did. It was hard on the family. They didn't like the hours I slept all the time because it required sometimes working through the night.
And so, but for that period of time, that was clearly the priority. Okay, so let me look at those priorities with you just a little bit. First of all, there are four, there are four areas that I think you have to consider. Okay, first is your personal life and walk, and and this will come up again and again as we go through our time together here, and I'm just going to touch on them briefly so that I can get in and get a good full slot at the business of the biblical view of work. But I need to put this in perspective for you to know that we're not making the thumb, you know, the huge thing on the hand or whatever it may be. You know, we're not trying to put things out of balance. Okay, so it's your personal life and walk, and I would propose to you, unless your relationship with God is right, and you have in your life daily fellowship with Jesus Christ through the scriptures, that it will be unlikely that you will be able to apply the things that we are going to be discussing during this, this term together.
It'll be very unlikely. You'll, you'll try the, the, the little gimmicks, and I'll give you some gimmicks to work on during this time, and, and I call them that because anytime you give a one two three four formula, you know it won't work for everybody. But unless you have that daily time with God, unless unless you're in a right relationship to Jesus Christ, you will not have the kind of peace that's promised in John sixteen thirty three in the midst of pressures. And there may be some area of your life that you are just living in in just definite sin. That may not be any big thing, but there's an area of your life that is very clearly, uh, in a circumstance that you know is not of God, and, and there's been that little prickling on you.
Well, I would say that God has that as his priority in your life more than anything else first, and then you can experience the peace that is expressed in John fourteen twenty seven. So your personal life, and I hope that through our time together, that you'll get a little picture of how to have a vital walk with God in the midst of pressures and circumstances. And it's not always by a two-hour hour quiet time. The last two days that I've had, I've been going, you know, eighteen hours a day, meeting with students and so forth, and I did not get much time in the word during those two days. Got some. In fact, my daughter was with me, and I was reading my Bible at eleven at night and said, didn't you have a quiet time this morning?
And I said, no. She go, I had my quiet time this morning. And she was up, she was traveling with me up to, uh, Boulder, and she was, um, watching me, needless to say. So, you- you've got to put your life together. Now, the second thing is your family. Now, your family is one of the basic purposes that God has put you here to raise, reproduce a family. And if you have a wife and children or a husband and children, then you have definite responsibilities in the home. And so, if I could give a better title to this whole sequence, it is how to balance job, family, and ministry.
And personal, I would have to put in, but I'm, the personal is so underlies everything, I can't even put it as a separate item. Your family, that Christ is first in the home, that you have biblical relationships with between you as a couple and with your family. Now, you can look up and read that particular passage. The other area that I'd mention is that you have some kind of an outreach. God did not put us here simply to exist. He did not put us here just to get up and eat in the morning and go to work, watch TV at night, get a good night's sleep, and get up and work again the next day.
That is not why we're here. But God has some specific purposes for us in the area of outreach. The Great Commission to reach the world for Jesus Christ applies to every Christian, not just to missionaries, not just to pastors, not just to full-time Christian workers, but somehow every one of us have got to have some part. Now, it's a different part, and it's in different amounts, but unless our lives are counting in that way, I again question if we will ever have fulfillment in our job. Okay, now let's get into the, the biblical view of work, the Christian in his job.
Now, almost everybody has problems with the job. It's too boring, it's too time consuming, too pressured, too much to do, too little money. Some people will say there's too little to do. I've been in one job where I, where there just wasn't enough to do. And a lot of guys that I've come in contact with in the Air Force who were at a missile site, they, it was just too little to do because, uh, they just had to sit and wait, basically, and so everything that they had to do was in the way of exercises and make do stuff for the one big moment. Well, it just gets plain boring, and so they have to have a perspective. Some people feel their job is meaningless. Many people, in fact, most people encounter conflicts on their job and can't get along.
Many people, in fact, most complain that the system is bad. The company is somehow doing them dirty, and that doesn't matter what the company is. If you're for a company of two people, the company will do you dirty. If you're a company with nine thousand people, it still has a system that you won't agree with and will put you under pressure in some way. Some people will think that there's persecution. So for the Christian in his job, and that's all I'm addressing this to, by the way, I'm addressing this to how a Christian relates to his job. The premise is that you have a resource beyond yourself, but there's still confusion, there's still frustration, there's still im- imbalance or bad attitudes, and in many cases, just plain sin in terms of the attitude toward the job.
And so let's look a little bit at, at the biblical view of work. There's a verse that really helped me a great deal, and it's Exodus thirty four twenty one. And I've known this verse for some while, and it may be one of the foundation verses of work in the entire Bible. And it has to do with the command of the Sabbath, and it says, six days you shall work, and the seventh day you shall rest, even in plowing time and harvest you shall rest. And boy, you know, I'm, I'm a little bit of a compulsive worker, and so I, I say, ooh, that's neat, rest on the seventh day.
That is tremendous. The rest, I need that, the weekend, the whole bit. And then I read the first part of the verse, it says, six days you shall work. I said, that's a command. It says, six days you shall work. Now that was interesting to me, that God had ordained that man would work six days. We're pushing to the four and a half day work week right now, and it's going down to four. And of course, with the way our society is going, that gives more and more free time, but basically gives a lot of purposelessness to so many people. Now, from the time of Adam, God made work an integral part of society.
There is no time in the Bible that I can find where work was not a function of man. And all the illustrations through the Old Testament and the New Testament basically are of workers. They're farmers, craftsmen, builders, stone cutters, jewel workers, plasterers, people that worked with timber, and just occasionally there's a manager. Not very often. The majority of illustrations are those who are working with their hands and are laboring. They are, they are skilled in the sense that they know what they are doing.
And as you read through the scriptures, you get the idea that that is a very important thing to God. Now, I can't go into all of the passages that are involved in work in the scriptures. There are quite a few, but let me point out a few very important ones. For instance, First Thessalonians four eleven and twelve. Pardon me, that, yeah, that's First Thess, First Thess four eleven and twelve. And you might want to just have me read these, and you make the notes and try and absorb, and then it's written down so you can look them up again. It says, and make it your ambition to lead a quiet life and attend to your own business and to work with your own hands, just as we commanded you, so that you may behave properly toward outsiders and not be in any need.
Now, as I understand that work, that, that verse and this passage, it says that we're to do our own secular work. I don't like that term, secular work, but I have to use it to be communicate clearly. Work with your own hands, as they had previously commanded you, so that you would behave properly toward those that are outside of Jesus Christ. So somehow it says in that verse that work has to do with your testimony to non-Christians. Now, if we would also look at uh second Thessalonians three seven through twelve, you get quite a view. Paul is writing to the Thessalonians, and in verse seven he says, for you yourselves know how you ought to follow our example, because we did not act in an undisciplined manner among you, nor did we eat anyone's bread without paying for it, but with labor and hardship we kept working night and day so that we might not be a burden to any of you.
Not because we did not have the right to do this, but in order to offer ourselves as a model for you that you might follow our examples. For even when we were with you, we used to give you this order: if anyone will not work, neither let him eat. That's New Testament too. And then in verse eleven, for we hear that some among you are leading an undisciplined life, doing no work at all, but acting like busybodies. Now such persons we command and exhort in the Lord Jesus Christ to work in a quiet fashion and eat their own bread, and so forth.
So you study this passage, and you very quickly get the view that work is very important to the Apostle Paul, as he is trying to train the people as to how to organize the church and how to live among themselves, because some of them apparently figured that now that they're Christians and the world mission is at hand, that they ought not to work. And, you know, they can kind of get the little socialistic system going, and others can work so they can, uh, they can benefit from it. Now, Paul said it's fine for some not to work and to be paid to do the ministry, but he said, I chose so that you wouldn't even have any chance of getting back at me.
I chose to work and provide for my own sustenance, and then I ask you to follow my example. You might ask yourself a question, in your job right now, would you want another Christian following your precise example? Boy, there are times that I think back in, in, in my jobs when I'm not sure that I would. There were times when I was not as either as efficient, there were times when my attitude was bad, and there were times when I don't believe I gave, uh, the Air Force its, its full return for what they should have had from my time. There, there are times that I can think of like that, and I'm sure you can too.
And so we want to get into some of the idea of how we can be an example. Now, I would like to mention one concept that I want also to permeate our time, and that is that no work is secular. I do not believe there is such a thing as secular work and religious work. There are different vocations. And so I think instead of full-time Christian worker or, uh, clergy or whatever that may be, and I know Pastor Tucker very much agrees, he doesn't even want to use the term layman. In fact, if you, I doubt if any of you have ever heard him use the word layman, because he has such a bad feeling for the, what that connotates. But the fact is that all work is sacred, because in God's view, all of life is sacred.
In God's view, there is not the s- the sacred and the secular. And then you run into the question, well, how can it possibly be that this job that I am doing, building this little thing or repairing this car or helping to produce this item can possibly contribute to the kingdom of God. How can it possibly be sacred work? And that's a question I'd like you to struggle with through this time, is how your job in particular contributes to the kingdom of God. Because that's a very crucial question, and we will come back to that as we get along in these sessions. Now let me talk for a minute about what the factors are to contentment in your job, and I'm going to mention them, and then we will come back to them a fair amount of time in, uh, in our studies together.
The first one is contribution. Somehow you need to feel that you are making a valid contribution in two areas, and those two areas, one, are society. That is, what you do does contribute to our society, and that is cr- that is a meaningful thing, by the way, to contribute to the ongoing of life in a society, whether it's here or in any other nation in the world, because that was the basic function of work at the beginning. A family would work together to provide food and sustenance. Then pretty soon, two families decide that you raise this and I'll raise that, and we'll trade.
And then they need some tools when the, when that type of an age came along, and one family decides that they'll primarily make the tools, trade the tools for the food, and they'll get a barter system going. And then fifteen or twenty families group together in an effort and put that thing together in what would be a village. And then beyond that, it becomes complicated in that they can't make equitable trades, and so they use stones, which have some meaning or value, which we would call money, to trade in and out for these things. And whether it would be metal or silver, you know, or or ivory or whatever it may be, you find that then they start using some form of money, and the further removed you get from actually trading for the necessities of life, the less you feel like you are really contributing to life.
And then with industrialization, what has happened is you feel totally removed from that very simple barter system, but that's really what we're working on. It's just that there's so many middlemen and along the way, and that, of course, inflation and all that, and then you become, feel like you've got a meaningless existence. Well, somehow we have to get down to the business that we can contribute to society. The second contribution is to contribute to God's kingdom. Now, I'd like you to jot down a verse as to what I mean by this. It's in Matthew five thirteen through sixteen. There it says, you are the salt of the earth, but if the salt has lost its savor or its flavor, how can it be made salty again?
It is good for nothing anymore except to be thrown out and trampled underfoot by men. You are the light of the world, and so forth. So the concepts of salt and light, and I'd like to go into those in detail if time permitted, but what God intends is that you be the salt of society. Now, to be salt, you're not salt here today, because you're all bunched up, and salt only does two things bunched up. It tastes bad if it dumps all on the food, and then it's a preservative if you put it all together, you know, pickled, that's that's a brine type situation. So when you bunch up like this, and this is your only function in Christianity, then you become preserved pickled Christians.
And the salt is in the improper perspective and balance. And so there are only two places that I see in all of society where God forces you to be salt. You're either salt or you're tasteless, one or the other, but you are salt in some form if you're a Christian, either good salt or tasteless salt. Those two areas are your job because you're forced into the world. You must work with that guy next to you that you don't like to work with. And the second area is your neighborhood, where you live. But the neighborhood, the walls are starting to get high, privacy is a big deal, and you may not even know your neighbors.
And so the job becomes even more important in the concept of contribution. The second factor in jobs is your relationships. Now, I do not have time to go through every aspect of these, but there are five areas that really hurt you in, in relationships if they are not in some kind of perspective. The first is the idea of competition, personal competition, that we simply compete with someone else and feel good when they get put down. Adam Smith says this, you could take away all the trophies and substitute plastic heads or whale's teeth.
As long as there's a way to keep score, men will play. And the score is either money or position or power or boats in the driveway or travel trailers or a bigger house. Somehow we have a scorekeeping system that is competition. And if unless we can deal with competition, we will not have the proper relationship. There is a right place for competition, and that is when you are not competing against an individual in terms of beating someone out, but competing against the system and against yourself in the sense of doing the best that you can in some fashion like that.
But when the person, when you start rejoicing in another person's downfall, that is the sign of improper, uh, view of competition. Sports is not, it's a different type of competition. It's a score, and I don't think it really fits. It can be brought out of perspective in sports, but I, I don't put it in the same, uh, category. If I did, I'd have to stop playing handball. I don't, and you know, when it gets practical, you... No, I, I don't think it applies, particularly in the area of sports. Yeah, in emotional competition, where you're against him, see, and you, you can sit, look at him eyeball to eyeball, and you're going to beat him out, and he is going to come out second, you're going to come out first, or vice versa.
Now, the world operates on that. Competition is one of the greatest motivating forces in our society. It is a fundamental of capitalism, but it can be in the right perspective where it is not, where it does not rip you up inside. And that is the important thing, where you, where you learn to have a proper perspective of yourself. So in this area of ambition and ability, I think I, I scheduled to come back and talk totally one whole time on the concepts of ambition and the concepts of ability, your self-image and the fact that God accepts you as you are. This is probably the worst one for everybody to live with, the concept of authority, the employer authority, government authority, family authority, and spiritual authority.
And none of us do not want to have authority over us. And we all want to lead, but we don't want to obey. Uh, one quote that I found on this was, when are miss men most useless, would you say? When they can't command and they can't obey. And another one is the idea of authority as it relates to your employer or your leader, and your employer is your leader, by the way, in many ways. So to love those below you is not so difficult. You love those below you without affecting your pride. Your posture is superior condescension, magnanimous moral conceit. But to love the man above you is different.
To love him without flattery or self-abasement. To love him without bitterness or resentment. To love him in the midst of conflict and pain. To love the man above you is love's highest hurdle. You cannot get over it alone. You cannot do it without the cross inside lifting you up. And so most of us, in our conflicts, we get torn up because of a conflict with a for- authority, because nobody wants anyone to tell them what to do. We hate regulations, we hate policies, we hate... Well, you may not hate your boss, but you sure don't like... He's okay as long as all he does is pat you on his, on your back. But let him put the screws down just a little bit, and you say, what right do you have?
And now in the secular world, of course, he, he says, I have the right of firing you. And so then you operate out of fear instead of out of love, and you get a wrong motivation coming into your obedience to authority. And by the way, in a non-Christian society, which ours is, the only thing that will make authority work is fear. Not ethics, not desire, or anything else. And that is unfortunate, and for a Christian, it ought not to be the motivation. There is a balance, but it depends on the motivation. I mean, you, you fear heat, you know, a child fears heat, and it's good.
Fear has its place in life, but there are several definitions of fear that we'd have to go into as to what kind of fear we're talking about. Fear of failure is the thing that, in many cases, really get to us. We're afraid to fail, and therefore we do not walk by faith. Let me just cover these other things quickly. If you have a, an attitude of serving, then you will have a better contribution in your job, and you'll feel more contented. And of course, the area of communication, that you're able to communicate in the context of your job. Many people have a problem because they simply don't know what is expected of them in their job. The other thing that is a factor and that we need to talk about is the area of excellence.
Colossians three twenty three, whatsoever you do, do it heartily as unto the Lord and not unto men. And this will be a theme that is going to come up regularly. God despises slothfulness. God commands us, especially in the book of Proverbs, to work hard. And there is something about what is often called the Puritan work ethic that does satisfy. The, the sleep of the laboring man is sweet, and many of us now in an industrialized society do not labor physically, and it affects us because all we do is labor mentally, and it tires you as much, but it does not benefit your body. And so you have to get a different balance.
In other words, it tires you, but it doesn't give you the exercise of your body, which a laboring job will, which will do other things for your system. And so you have to learn how to balance your life and keep your whole life going, which is physical, spiritual, and emotional. And then the attitude is just so key. The attitude, an attitude of resentment, bitterness, discouragement, hate, griping, and demanding your rights is a problem. Okay, let me just review for just a moment now some of the solutions that we can get into and that we'll discuss during this time. Now, part of them I've included there, and I'll repeat these next week, so let me just say them because, uh, we've only got two minutes left in the class, and they're gonna, Russ Johnson's gonna come in and kick me out.
Okay, so the first thing and a solution in a problem in your job is you have to identify the problem. Now, in identifying the problem, there are a number of issues that are involved. First is to realize God's sovereignty in my current circumstance, and under that little section of God's sovereignty, I left a space, and there are six questions that I would ask. One is, am I in God's will? The second, is the job sin? Thirdly, what have I done to make the job hard? See, many times it's our own foot in our mouth that's done it. And fourthly, do I witness by how I work? Fifthly, what are my motives in the job?
And sixthly, does the job cost me my life? And I'll have to explain that one just a little bit. Then the problem may be, and this is two with a little parentheses after it there, doing substandard work. You really are not doing good work, either because you can't or because you don't take the time to do it. The third area that is identifying the problem is bad relationships. The fourth is the grass is greener syndrome that we just simply say, I'm going to get out of here. The fifth is resentment towards authority. Now, in that process then, what we need to do, the next major step, and that's that little B that I put down there, is to surrender your job to God.
And I think this week that may be the assignment that I would give you, is get on your knees before God, just try and identify the problems that you're encountering in your job, and then tell God that you've got my job, my future, my the whole system, and that I'm really looking for some answers in this area. Then the other, the next point is that I would urge you to change your work habits, because they may well need changing, and do things like, what can I give to the job? What can I learn? Who can I serve? Another solution is that we want to set goals for the future, both in your job and in your entire career. And a key thing, and this is that little item E that I put, I'll just keep you in with this outline, is to pray for your coworkers daily.
That is a fantastic thing if you are really praying for those who work with you. And then know your own gifts and abilities. And lastly, be a team man or a team woman. For a wife, are you a team with your husband? Are you a team man at your job, or are you only out for your own things? So I would like to urge you, as we go through the sessions together on the job, that the areas now that I've just touched on, and my purpose here was to whet your appetite as to the kind of things we're going to be discussing all term.