Faith and Work News ~ Links to Interesting Articles

• To Quit of Not to Quit? When Kingdom and Company Goals Conflict. Dan Doriani, who I enjoyed two classes with at Covenant Seminary, writes “When we stay engaged with a tainted workplace, we line up with God’s plan revealed in the incarnation.”
• In a Post-COVID Workforce, Agility is Key. In the first of a series of articles, Jonathan Chambers writes “As businesses slowly reopen, and Americans prepare to either return to work, or look for work, one major question looms: What skills really matter now?”
• 3 Spiritual Phrases Christian Leaders Should Stop Saying. Carey Nieuwhof shares three leadership cop-outs that sound spiritual, but aren’t.
• God Works Through You. Russ Gehrlein writes “Those of us who follow Jesus Christ can experience God’s presence at work while He is working in us, with us, and through us to meet the legitimate needs of everyone whom we meet on our journey.”

Click on ‘Continue reading’ for:

• More links to interesting articles
• The Top 10 Faith and Work Quotes of the Week
• My Review of Work and Our Labor in the Lord by James M. Hamilton Jr
• Snippets from the book Work and Worship: Reconnecting Our Labor and Liturgy by Matthew Kaemingk and Cory B. Willson

• Knowing the Will of God. Want to know the will of God for your life, including your vocation? Listen to this message from R.C. Sproul on Renewing Your Mind.
• Riding Kenya’s Prayer Train to Work. Matthew Kaemingk asks “Must we completely forfeit the public character of Christian faith and worship in our pluralistic cities?”
• Are the Call to Do Good and the Call to Work at Odds? Matt Perman writes “For Christians, there is no tension between the call to do good and the call to have a job and work.”
• Reconnecting Work and Worship Webinar. Mark Roberts, Executive Director of the De Pree Center, hosts this conversation with Matthew Kaemingk, co-author of the new book Work and Worship: Reconnecting Our Labor and Liturgy with Cory Willson.
• The 6 Types of Working Genius. On this episode of the Andy Stanley Leadership Podcast, Patrick Lencioni joins the program to discuss the six types of working geniuses.
• Running Your Business to the Glory of God. Randy Alcorn shares stories about Christian business owners from his book Giving Is The Good Life, examples that he states can inspire us and give us footsteps to follow.
• How to Cope When You Can’t Escape Stress at Work. Aaron Brockmeier writes “When stress builds to the place of taking over and causing you to lose perspective, take a moment and pray.”
• Called to Lead. My book Called to Lead: Living and Leading for Jesus in the Workplace is now available in both a paperback and Kindle edition. Read a free sample (Introduction through Chapter 2).
  

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• The work of a stay-at-home parent, college student, or volunteer is just as valuable as one who earns a wage or salary as a result of his or her labor. Russ Gehrlein
• Whatever you do for Christ, throw your whole soul into it. Do not give Christ a little halfhearted labor, done as a matter of course every now and then; but when you serve Him, do it with heart and soul and strength. Charles Spurgeon
• The biblical view of a week helps offset the cultural loathing of Mondays. The week doesn’t begin with Monday emails and task lists. The week begins on Sunday with rest, worship, family, and laughter. Sunday, not Monday, sets the trajectory and theme of our week. Joe Holland
• True leadership must be for the benefit of the followers, not to enrich the leader. John Maxwell
• You will not have a meaningful life without work, but you will lose yourself if you say work is the meaning of your life. Tim Keller
• The shop, the barn, the kitchen, and the workbench become temples when men and women do all to the glory of God! Charles Spurgeon
• There are few things in life more important than valuing people. John Maxwell
• A mentor is not someone who walks ahead of us to show us how they did it. A mentor walks alongside us to show us what we can do. Simon Sinek
• As leaders, it is sometimes easier for us to see potential for the future in others than it is for them to see it in themselves. It is the role of the leader to help others discover their paths. Dee Ann Turner
  

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Work and Our Labor in the Lord by James M. Hamilton Jr. Crossway. 128 pages. 2017.
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This book, a biblical theological study on the topic of work, is part of the “Short Studies in Biblical Theology” series from Crossway. In the book, pastor, professor, and biblical scholar James Hamilton explores how work fits into the big story of the Bible; revealing the glory that God intended when he gave man work to do, the ruin that came as a result of the fall, and the redemption yet to come, offering hope for flourishing in the midst of fallen futility.” The book begins by looking at God’s design for work in the very good creation, prior to sin. From there it moves to consider what work looks like in a fallen world and what work should be in the kingdom that the Lord Christ has inaugurated. The book concludes by looking at what the Bible indicates about work in the new heaven and the new earth the Lord Jesus will bring. The book enables us to explore work as it was meant to be, as it is, as it can be, and as it will be.

Below are ten of my takeaways from this short, but meaty, book:

1. Work is neither punishment nor cursed drudgery but an exalted, Godlike activity.
2. Being in the image and likeness of God, working to fill the earth with God’s image bearers, subduing it according to God’s character, ruling it as God’s representative—work points to the character and glory of God.
3. Work continues to point beyond itself, with the character of God being displayed in the way God’s people do their work.
4. God made man to work, but sin resulted in God’s judgment. God’s word of judgment against sin makes the work painful, the environment cursed, and the relationships between men and women strained. Because of sin, work will be futile, frustrating, and fatal. Everyone dies.
5. The fact that the man and woman are allowed to continue in their work, cursed though it is, means that they still have the job of making the ways of God known in the world.
6. To bear his image as Christlike imitators of God, Christians must reflect the one they worship in the way they work.
7. Work that does not communicate love for God and neighbor is idolatrous because such work exalts something other than God as ultimate, making a god of oneself or mammon or one’s agenda or whatever.
8. The new work we will do is the work of ruling and subduing, working and keeping, exercising dominion and rendering judgment, all as God’s people in God’s place in God’s way.
9. Jesus will come and make it so that mankind can do the work in the world that God created us to do.
10. God built us to do something, and in the new heavens and the new earth we will be liberated to do the work for which God fitted us when he formed us in the womb.
    

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Faith and Work Book Club – Won’t you read along with us?

Work and Worship: Reconnecting Our Labor and Liturgy by Matthew Kaemingk and Cory B. Willson

Drawing on years of research, ministry, and leadership experience, in this new book Matthew Kaemingk and Cory B. Willson explain why Sunday morning worship and Monday morning work desperately need to inform and impact one another. Together they engage in a rich biblical, theological, and historical exploration of the deep and life-giving connections between labor and liturgy. In so doing, Kaemingk and Willson offer new ways in which Christian communities can live seamless lives of work and worship.

This week we look at Chapter 2: Worship That Fails Workers. Here are a few takeaways from the chapter:

• Institutional worship does not commission or send the organic church into the world.
• Immersed in this world of institutional worship, workers find it increasingly difficult to imagine that their work participates in the mission of God at all.
• If faith is a private and personal journey, the task of integrating faith and work is going to be a lonely one.
• A worker who does not practice being an active and responsible priest in the sanctuary will find it difficult to actively assume this role in the workplace.
• Fueling worship convinces workers that the sanctuary is the only place where Christ can truly be Emmanuel—God with us.
• Workers who spend extended periods of time in privatized worship can begin to build higher and higher walls separating their private faith from their public work.
• Those who lead worship rarely consider fully what it means that worshipers are also workers.