Faith and Work News ~ Links to Interesting Articles

• How Should We Handle Temptation at Work? David L. Winters shares three ways to resist temptation.
• Leaders, Do Your Team Members Know How Much You Care? Teams generally aren’t going to be impressed with a leader’s prior experience, results, reputation and advanced degrees until they are convinced that the leader cares about them as an individual. What are some ways that a leader shows their followers that they care about them? Here are 4 ways.
• How Can I Remain Fruitful in My Old Age or in My Retirement? Retirement affords many people extra time in their daily schedules. On this episode of the Ask Ligonier podcast, Robert Godfrey offers suggestions to help older Christians use their gifts to serve the Lord faithfully through their retirement years.
• Mere Christians: Linda Braddy. On this episode of the Mere Christians podcast, Jordan Rayner visits with Dr. Linda Braddy, CEO of the Red Cross-North Texas about how Linda was freed from analysis paralysis about discerning “God’s will” for her work, the biblical evidence that God cares about your work and not just what your work does “for the kingdom,” and how a proper theology of the New Earth has made Linda feel more alive and much more likely to share her faith.

Click on ‘Continue reading’ for:

• More links to interesting articles
• The Top 10 Faith and Work Quotes of the Week
• Faith and Work Book Review ~ The Word Before Work: A Monday-Through-Friday Devotional to Help You Find Eternal Purpose in Your Daily Work by Jordan Raynor
• Quotes from the book Agents of Flourishing: Pursuing Shalom in Every Corner of Society by Amy Sherman.

• Called to Lead. My book Called to Lead: Living and Leading for Jesus in the Workplace is available in both a paperback and Kindle edition. Read a free sample (Introduction through Chapter 2).
• Mere Christians: Luke LeFevre. On this episode of the Mere Christians podcast, Jordan Rayner visits with Luke LeFevre, Founder of Holy Work, about the 7 stages everyone goes through when creating with God, why failure may be a sign of God’s favor, and how to journal well in just eleven minutes.
• How Does the Gospel Relate to the Theology of Work? Russ Gehrlein shares what the gospel entails, and then relate this central theme to how he views work.
• How Our Passions & Vocation Tie Into God’s Grand Narrative. John Stonestreet writes “To be Christian is to be called to God’s redeeming work in the world. And anyone who is in Christ can and should seek to glorify God wherever they are—even on a Monday.”
• The Importance of Honoring God & Bringing Your Faith to the Workplace. Diane Paddison writes “Every single time you do what God has called you to do, it honors him, whether you are worshiping on Sunday or filing documents on Tuesday.”
• Mere Christians: Jon Houghton. On this episode of the Mere Christians podcast, Jordan Rayner visits with Jon Houghton, CEO of The Holy Post, about how caring about ALL that God cares about will change how we work, how to think about evangelism and social action as two elements of an interconnected flywheel, and why Christians should never outsource their discernment (and how we frequently do).
• Learning Karate by Waxing Cars. Russ Gehrlein writes “Last week, I had an interesting discussion with our unit chaplain. His main point is that we don’t always see the results of our hard work. If the end result of what we are pursuing is worth the effort, we need to press on by faith, regardless of the feedback we receive.”
• Mere Christians: Dave Hataj. On this episode of the Mere Christians podcast, Jordan Rayner visits with Dave Hataj, owner of Edgerton Gear, Inc., and author of the book Good Work: How Blue Collar Business Can Change Lives, Communities, and the World, about how good jobs are saving the lives of twenty-somethings at his company, why our definition of “kingdom work” needs to expand beyond saving souls, and how to plant a desire for goodness and truth that ultimately leads to Christ.

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• Emotionally unhealthy leaders do not practice Sabbath — a weekly, twenty-four-hour period in which they cease all work and rest, delight in God’s gifts, and enjoy life with him. Peter Scazzero
• The Church’s approach to an intelligent carpenter is usually confined to exhorting him not to be drunk and disorderly in his leisure hours, and to come to church on Sundays. What the Church should be telling him is this: that the very first demand that his religion makes upon him is that he should make good tables. Dorothy Sayers
• Serving others is the only valid motivation for leadership. Patrick Lencioni
• We don’t worship our work—that is idolatry. But from the beginning our work was designed to be a primary way we worship God. Tom Nelson
• I believe that one of the great moves of God is going to be through the believers in the workplace. Billy Graham
• The Christian life is to be lived out in our family, our work, our community, and our church. Such things seem mundane, but this is because of our blindness. Actually, God is very present in them—and in us—in a mighty, though hidden way. Gene Veith
• Work is not, primarily, a thing one does to live, but the thing one lives to do. It is, or it should be, the full expression of the worker’s faculties, the medium in which he offers himself to God. Dorothy Sayers
• The Sabbath is critical to our understanding of a theology of work because God put a lot of emphasis on it for His people. Russ Gehrlein
• Sometimes work means doing what you have to do, not what you want. David Bahnsen

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FAITH AND WORK BOOK REVIEW:

The Word Before Work: A Monday-Through-Friday Devotional to Help You Find Eternal Purpose in Your Daily Work by Jordan Raynor. WaterBrook. 2022. 292 pages
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One of the recent books from best-selling author Jordan Raynor (Master of One, Called to Create, Redeeming Your Time), is a Monday through Friday devotional. The first four weeks of the devotional is dedicated to helping you build a foundational understanding of what God’s Word says about your work. The rest of this book will walk you through the whole of Scripture, focusing on the passages most relevant to your work, organized as follows: Mondays: Old Testament; Tuesdays: New Testament; Wednesdays: Wisdom Literature; Thursdays: Old Testament; Fridays: New Testament. The author also provides an additional website where he has included free resources to help you dive deeper into the topic of each day’s reading.
I enjoyed using the devotional throughout 2023, and recommend it to you. The readings are relatively short, so that you can read them prior to digging into your work each workday.

Here are some of my favorite quotes from the book:

• Work isn’t a necessary evil or a meaningless means to an end. Work is dignified, meaningful, and good in and of itself.
• Work existed prior to the Fall, and thus, work was designed to be worship.
• Work isn’t hard because it is inherently evil. Work is hard because we still live in a fallen world.
• Whether you’re an entrepreneur, plumber, or mother, your work matters because it is a means of glorifying God.
• Care about those you work with beyond their productivity, and invest time to get to know the “whole persons” that surround you Monday through Friday.
• When we do our work well, we have the great privilege of glorifying God and serving others through the ministry of excellence.
• Rest is one of the most powerful ways we can preach the gospel to ourselves.
• If you want your work to be worship—a means of serving God rather than yourself, a true calling on your life—then you must prioritize regular time in the Word.
• You aren’t responsible for the fruit of your labor. God is. Your job is merely to steward your talents and opportunities faithfully.
• God doesn’t necessarily call us to be the best in our fields, but he does call us to do our best with the talents and opportunities we have been given.
• As your work gets busier, make it even more of a priority to spend time with the Lord each morning or evening.
• To make the most of the time God has given us, we must get clear on the work we believe he has called us to do and develop the habit of saying no to opportunities—even really good ones—that distract us from our essential mission.
• Work matters deeply to the Creator God, as he prizes both beauty and function.
• Creativity is central to who God is and who we are as his image bearers.
• How can you glorify God without words today? By creating an excellent product, loving your co-workers as yourself in every decision you make, and seeking to serve rather than be served.
• Whatever your work is, do it with excellence and genuine love.
• As Christians, we believe that the primary purpose of our work is to glorify God and serve others.
• The Lord has called each of us to use our chosen vocations in intentional ways to win the respect of outsiders and make disciples of Jesus Christ.
• When you do your work with integrity and justice, in accordance with the Lord’s commands, you bring him delight.
• Do your work today knowing that every interaction, project, meeting, and moment is an opportunity to bring glory to God!
• Your labor is nothing less than the hands and feet of God at work in the world. May that truth give you a sense of purpose, responsibility, and grace today!
• Believer, there is perfect, fully redeemed work awaiting you on the other side of the eternal thoroughfare. And there is also the Sabbath rest you and I are craving.
• Work, which is currently marred by sin, will be perfect worship once again when the present heaven comes to the New Earth
• Perseverance is the path to mastery, and mastery is the path to service, and service is the path to sustainable joy in our work.

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

We are reading Agents of Flourishing: Pursuing Shalom in Every Corner of Society by Amy Sherman. Sherman is also the author of Kingdom Calling: Vocational Stewardship for the Common Good, a book I first read in my “Calling, Vocation and Work” class at Covenant Seminary.
Every corner, every square inch of society can flourish as God intends, and Christians of any vocation can become agents of that flourishing. In this book, Sherman offers a multifaceted, biblically grounded framework for enacting God’s call to seek the shalom of our communities in six arenas of civilizational life (The Good, The True, The Beautiful, The Just, The Prosperous, and The Sustainable).
This week we look at Chapter 15: A Strategy for Cultivating the Sustainable. Here are a few helpful quotes from the chapter:

• One hears plenty about shalom, God’s kingdom, and justice—and public health and safety—at Church of the Redeemer.
• The poor and minorities face greater exposure to pollutants and suffer worse health outcomes. This is the larger context of the environmental injustice that Church of the Redeemer took on in its small neighborhood.
• Leaders at Church of the Redeemer see the social problems confronting their neighborhood as intertwined with spiritual dynamics. Fighting them necessarily involves spiritual power.