WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:05.440 All right, let's consider together the question, does my work matter? 00:00:06.259 --> 00:00:11.839 At every open forum we've had, this is the third one, there's a thesis that's always been some 00:00:11.839 --> 00:00:16.879 ! version of the same thing, and so I'll present it again tonight, and it's this, that Christianity 00:00:16.879 --> 00:00:23.000 is intellectually credible for the life of the mind, practically livable for the good of society, 00:00:23.420 --> 00:00:26.359 and existentially satisfying for the needs of the human heart. 00:00:26.359 --> 00:00:35.579 So, there are three tests, and more perhaps, but three basic tests for any worldview, philosophy, 00:00:35.719 --> 00:00:41.619 or religion, and that's, is that religion, worldview, or philosophy intellectually credible? 00:00:42.100 --> 00:00:47.480 So, does it actually make sense of the world as we experience it? The second is, is it practically 00:00:47.480 --> 00:00:54.399 livable? So, can you actually go out into the world Monday to Friday and live what you are claiming to 00:00:54.399 --> 00:00:59.259 believe in, and does it make life better for others? Does it provide an explanation for what we call 00:00:59.259 --> 00:01:04.539 the common good and a way to actually pursue it? That's the second test. The third test is, 00:01:04.939 --> 00:01:10.140 is it existentially satisfying? And that's the question, does the religion, worldview, or philosophy 00:01:10.140 --> 00:01:15.200 you subscribe to meet the needs that the human heart possesses? And so, some of those needs 00:01:15.200 --> 00:01:21.500 are very consistent. We all want to be loved unconditionally. We want to matter. We want the 00:01:21.500 --> 00:01:26.260 things we do in life to have purpose and meaning, and our lives to have purpose and meaning. And so, 00:01:26.319 --> 00:01:31.760 you can take those three questions, intellectual credibility, practical livability, existential 00:01:31.760 --> 00:01:37.379 satisfaction, and apply them to any religion, worldview, and philosophy, and ask, does this fit? 00:01:37.480 --> 00:01:42.560 Does this make sense with the world as we see it? And so, tonight, we have a test case for that, 00:01:42.560 --> 00:01:48.840 and it's work. And when we talk about work here, what I'm talking about is the nine to five, 00:01:49.219 --> 00:01:58.800 the nine to five, a way to make a living, as the late Dolly Parton said. One of the ways to approach 00:01:58.800 --> 00:02:06.120 this is to see that even when you bring up the topic of work, you need a definition for work, 00:02:06.260 --> 00:02:12.039 what work actually is. And Christianity even provides that for us. It's a distinct definition 00:02:12.039 --> 00:02:18.519 from the way, if you were to ask a thousand people in the city, what is work? I think we would perhaps 00:02:18.519 --> 00:02:21.840 struggle to come up with a definition, but Christianity actually provides one, and it's this. 00:02:22.299 --> 00:02:28.439 Work is any effort that brings order and flourishing out of the raw stuff of creation. 00:02:29.299 --> 00:02:36.919 Work is anything we do, any effort we do, that brings flourishing out of the raw material that God has 00:02:36.919 --> 00:02:42.539 given us in creation. So, that's a religious definition, a Christian definition of even the 00:02:42.539 --> 00:02:47.459 concept of work itself. Now, the reason that definition matters so much, and the reason this 00:02:47.459 --> 00:02:53.619 thesis, I think, matters so much is that there was a book I read a few years ago by an author called 00:02:53.619 --> 00:02:58.759 Oliver Berkman, an English author. Some of you may have come across it, 4,000 Weeks to Live. 00:02:58.759 --> 00:03:05.179 And it's a very compelling text. And in it, he says that the average age of the contemporary world is 00:03:05.179 --> 00:03:11.239 about 80 years. We live for about 80 years. And that means that we get about 4,000 weeks each to live. 00:03:11.799 --> 00:03:18.620 And the question is, how many of those have we already spent? And that means that Berkman's 00:03:18.620 --> 00:03:23.979 suggesting we have a very limited amount of time. Time is a scarce resource. And there was a study a 00:03:23.979 --> 00:03:31.120 couple years back on the average worker, the 9 to 5 worker in Britain. And it said that for the average 00:03:31.120 --> 00:03:38.179 worker who does paid work in the UK, you will work 90,000 hours in your adult life. That's excluding the 00:03:38.179 --> 00:03:44.819 hours you spent in education. Now, that's for paid work. But if you also add in unpaid work, all the hours 00:03:44.819 --> 00:03:50.819 that you run errands or go to the bank or do your finances and all these things, it doubles. And it comes 00:03:50.819 --> 00:03:57.239 about 180,000 hours of work paid and unpaid throughout your lifetime. Now, I don't say that 00:03:57.239 --> 00:04:03.479 to be discouraging to you, 180,000 hours of work across these 4,000 weeks that we live. But just to 00:04:03.479 --> 00:04:10.539 say that work is a very serious time commitment. And for the average Brit in this study, the person 00:04:10.539 --> 00:04:17.439 living here, the resident, it said that most of us will spend far more time with our colleagues if we're 00:04:17.439 --> 00:04:23.879 in paid vocations than we ever will with our family members. And that's a simple statistical fact 00:04:23.879 --> 00:04:31.100 of the amount of time we spend at work in our waking lives. And so, what I want to do tonight 00:04:31.100 --> 00:04:37.639 is basically say work is actually a topic that matters so much because you spend about 180,000 00:04:37.639 --> 00:04:42.439 hours on it across your lifetime. And Christianity has so much to say about it. And so, let's take 00:04:42.439 --> 00:04:49.439 these three tests and apply them to the question of work. Does Christianity make sense of work, 00:04:49.540 --> 00:04:56.079 firstly? Does it give a livable pathway? Does it make it practically livable? And finally, does it 00:04:56.079 --> 00:05:02.300 satisfy our longings for work to matter beyond the mere drudgery of the nine to five? So, those three 00:05:02.300 --> 00:05:09.120 questions, and those are our three headings for the evening. So, first, how does Christianity make 00:05:09.120 --> 00:05:14.000 sense of work? And I'm thinking here especially of intellectual sense of the very concept and fact 00:05:14.000 --> 00:05:21.720 of work. Now, there's a paradox, I think, that needs to be explained intellectually by our experience 00:05:21.720 --> 00:05:27.280 of work, especially in the modern world. There's an author named Studs Terkel, very funny name, 00:05:27.699 --> 00:05:34.620 Studs Terkel, but he wrote a book called Working in the 1970s. And this is how he opens the text. He says, 00:05:34.620 --> 00:05:42.620 this book is about a search for daily meaning as well as daily bread, for recognition as well as cash, 00:05:43.120 --> 00:05:51.600 for astonishment rather than just boredom. In short, for a sort of life, a sort of life, rather than a 00:05:51.600 --> 00:05:58.699 Monday through Friday sort of dying. Now, that's the paradox. Terkel, I think, nails it. He says that we all 00:05:58.699 --> 00:06:06.000 know the experience of going to work and experiencing at times a sort of life in work, 00:06:06.500 --> 00:06:13.699 and then at other times experiencing a sort of Monday to Friday death in work. And that's the 00:06:13.699 --> 00:06:18.139 paradox that I would imagine everybody in here can say that they've lived through, no matter if they're 00:06:18.139 --> 00:06:24.379 in a time of education or a time of paid work or unpaid work. And eventually, the bubble burst 00:06:24.379 --> 00:06:30.339 in the experience of our work lives in a few ways that really bring these two sides of the paradox 00:06:30.339 --> 00:06:36.240 out. On the one hand, if you have big ambitions and you get your ambitions and you arrive at 00:06:36.240 --> 00:06:40.800 everything you've ever wanted, what most people tend to find out, and this is a very old story, 00:06:40.860 --> 00:06:47.980 is that the dream job is just okay. It's good, but it leaves you unfulfilled, and it's not quite what 00:06:47.980 --> 00:06:53.159 you thought it would provide for your life. And there's a little death in the lack of meaning that it 00:06:53.160 --> 00:06:57.920 actually gives you that you thought it might. Or on the other hand, you don't get your ambitions. 00:06:58.260 --> 00:07:03.100 You don't get the meaning and the worth and the value of rising up the corporate ladder or wherever 00:07:03.100 --> 00:07:08.460 it might be that you thought you would. And work, for many of us, becomes actually about drudgery to 00:07:08.460 --> 00:07:14.520 pay the rent and to put food on the table. And either way, there's a little death in that too. 00:07:15.180 --> 00:07:20.080 A Monday to Friday sort of dying that's more felt in the day-to-day life. But then at the same time, 00:07:20.079 --> 00:07:29.199 on the opposite side of things, if you lose your job, if you lose work, if you even sometimes retirees 00:07:29.199 --> 00:07:34.659 will talk about this, you say, you know, I'm not doing very much, and I thought I was going to be 00:07:34.659 --> 00:07:40.219 relieved by this, but I'm incredibly bored. Work may have been better. You experience in those moments 00:07:40.219 --> 00:07:45.099 of unemployment, you say, I actually can't live without working. I don't know if you've had the 00:07:45.100 --> 00:07:50.660 experience. I think I do know you've had the experience of sitting, laying on the couch on a 00:07:50.660 --> 00:07:57.180 Sunday afternoon, perhaps, and scrolling through TikTok reels, Instagram reels, YouTube reels, and 00:07:57.180 --> 00:08:03.439 finding that two hours have passed by. And you feel like a bit of your soul has been lost in that. 00:08:04.100 --> 00:08:10.840 And you wake up from that stupor feeling incredibly unproductive. And it hurts, and it's a pain, and it's a 00:08:10.839 --> 00:08:16.719 sort of dying that goes on the inside. Why? Because the paradox is real. On the one hand, you're 00:08:16.719 --> 00:08:22.479 incredibly, you need work so much. It's fundamental to who you are. And in times of being unproductive, 00:08:22.560 --> 00:08:27.239 you feel that. You feel that. And on the other hand, you can't stay in work. And there's a Monday 00:08:27.239 --> 00:08:32.019 to Friday sort of dying that happens every single week in that rhythm, that paradox. Now, Christianity, 00:08:32.279 --> 00:08:37.759 I want to suggest to you, intellectually explains why that is very helpfully, and explains both at once. 00:08:37.759 --> 00:08:42.679 On the one hand, Christianity says you cannot live without work because you were made for it. 00:08:43.799 --> 00:08:50.759 And so, in the ancient Near East, in the Babylonian stories of religion, and the Greek stories of 00:08:50.759 --> 00:08:55.360 religion, in all of those stories, there's something very consistent in the polytheistic world of the 00:08:55.360 --> 00:09:00.860 ancient world. And that's that the stories we have, the mythologies we have from those worlds, 00:09:01.080 --> 00:09:07.100 the gods do not work. The gods never work. And work is something for only the slave race, 00:09:07.100 --> 00:09:12.620 and that is the race of humanity in these ancient mythologies. When you open the Christian Bible 00:09:12.620 --> 00:09:19.680 and turn to the first page of the Christian Bible in Genesis 1, what you have is a god that is working 00:09:19.680 --> 00:09:24.899 immediately. It's so contrary to all the other religions, most of the religions that have ever 00:09:24.899 --> 00:09:33.300 existed. God is a worker on page 1, and history begins with a work week. And Genesis 2, the second 00:09:33.299 --> 00:09:38.279 chapter of the Bible says, at the end of that work week of God making everything, He rested from all 00:09:38.279 --> 00:09:44.899 His work that He had done. It's striking. Some of the commentators, the scholars that study these passages, 00:09:45.399 --> 00:09:51.159 point out that the ordinary word for human work in the language that the Old Testament was written in 00:09:51.159 --> 00:09:56.679 is used for God in a way that would never have been the case in the ancient mythologies. 00:09:56.679 --> 00:10:03.859 And it says, even in a place like Proverbs 8, that God is described as a craftsman and an artist, 00:10:04.000 --> 00:10:11.559 a master workman. That is a shocking thing for an ancient person to read. And even further than that, 00:10:11.599 --> 00:10:17.000 right after that, it says that you as a human being were made in God's image. And the very first command 00:10:17.000 --> 00:10:22.779 that God gave you is to go out into the world and be like Him being a worker. And that He's actually 00:10:22.779 --> 00:10:28.079 put that into your heart most fundamentally where, not according to the Christian tradition and 00:10:28.079 --> 00:10:35.319 Scriptures, after the problem of sin came into the world, but before. In paradise, you were made to be 00:10:35.319 --> 00:10:41.500 a worker because God, who is perfect in every way, is also a worker. And so, the reason that when you 00:10:41.500 --> 00:10:47.559 scroll far too long on the couch on a Sunday afternoon, that you feel an emptiness inside, or if you 00:10:47.559 --> 00:10:54.159 lose a job in unemployment for a long season, or even if you're retired and you feel like life has 00:10:54.159 --> 00:10:57.879 lost a bit of its meaning and purpose in a way because you haven't yet figured out your path, 00:10:57.939 --> 00:11:02.559 your vocation in that season, it is because of something very true about your anthropology, 00:11:02.859 --> 00:11:08.919 about who you are. You are a worker. You were made by the God who works to work. And it's actually a 00:11:08.919 --> 00:11:14.139 space of deep fulfillment. And so, Christianity explains that side of the equation so well. On the flip side 00:11:14.139 --> 00:11:19.559 of the equation, you can't stand work, Monday to Friday. It's a sort of dying every single week in 00:11:19.559 --> 00:11:26.519 a way. And that's because we learn in the Christian tradition that work is also cursed. And in other 00:11:26.519 --> 00:11:30.919 words, one thing to say is Christianity is so realistic. It gives such an explanation for the 00:11:30.919 --> 00:11:36.259 pain that we experience through work all the time. And the story is really this. We were made by 00:11:36.259 --> 00:11:43.720 a craftsman, the divine artist, to be workers that work underneath Him and alongside Him in 00:11:43.720 --> 00:11:48.279 partnership. That's what He made us for. And when we rebelled against that partnership, 00:11:49.040 --> 00:11:54.879 we effectively brought a curse upon all work. It's represented in Genesis 2 by this image of 00:11:54.879 --> 00:12:00.860 thorns and thistles rising against us every time we try to go out and farm the land. And so, 00:12:01.040 --> 00:12:07.899 the Christian answer, the intellectual explanation to this great question is work is not a curse. Work is 00:12:07.899 --> 00:12:14.699 good fundamentally, but work is cursed. Work is good, but work is cursed. And that explains so much 00:12:14.699 --> 00:12:24.039 of our experience. So, if you are a person who goes to work and your boss takes all the credit when you 00:12:24.039 --> 00:12:30.579 do something well and he gives you all the blame when you do something wrong, or you meet your quarterly 00:12:30.579 --> 00:12:36.179 projections and then Monday comes and the new quarter starts over and you realize, I am in a rat race of 00:12:36.179 --> 00:12:41.679 having to meet those same projections every single quarter. And you feel like you are Sisyphus pushing 00:12:41.679 --> 00:12:48.500 that boulder up the hill and it rolls back down every single time. As one writer puts it, every week, 00:12:49.199 --> 00:12:55.099 a person in your home, a mother caring for her children, a father caring for his children, he 00:12:55.099 --> 00:13:01.299 cleans the house, she cleans the house, and the dirt comes back again. And you feel like, you do feel like 00:13:01.299 --> 00:13:05.519 Sisyphus pushing that boulder up the hill. Well, there's a great reason for that, and that's because 00:13:05.519 --> 00:13:11.459 while work is good and you can't live without it, work is cursed because of our rebellion against God, 00:13:11.519 --> 00:13:16.759 the great worker. And that makes so much sense of the experience that we all have in this world. 00:13:17.500 --> 00:13:22.240 Now, the second thing, not only do I think Christianity makes sense intellectually of work, 00:13:22.299 --> 00:13:30.259 but it also explains so well why work is actually…the Christian idea of work is practically livable. 00:13:30.259 --> 00:13:38.159 These problems are made worse by our culture, the modern culture around work, and they're really 00:13:38.159 --> 00:13:44.299 two scripts, two ways the culture, I think, shapes us to see our work. Number one, the culture very 00:13:44.299 --> 00:13:50.059 unhelpfully teaches us, and we receive this unconsciously in all sorts of ways throughout 00:13:50.059 --> 00:13:57.080 our life, that work exists as a space for you to prove your worth in. So, Derek Thompson, 00:13:57.080 --> 00:14:03.120 a writer at The Atlantic, he wrote an article called Workism, and he describes this very well. He says, 00:14:03.580 --> 00:14:08.920 the belief that work is not only necessary to economic production, but is also the centerpiece 00:14:08.920 --> 00:14:15.660 of one's identity and life's purpose, that is what I mean by workism. So, he describes workism as 00:14:15.660 --> 00:14:22.480 thinking of work as a place to achieve an identity and actually find a space of value and worth for your 00:14:22.480 --> 00:14:28.379 very inner being because of reaching your ambitions. And it's striking. Derek Thompson, he writes this 00:14:28.379 --> 00:14:35.120 article. He's not a religious person. He explains that. Yet, he says this. He calls this one of the 00:14:35.120 --> 00:14:42.740 most powerful new religions competing for congregants. And he says, everybody worships something. That's one 00:14:42.740 --> 00:14:48.519 of the fundamental tenets of the Christian experience. And says that we worship in the modern world who we're 00:14:48.519 --> 00:14:54.639 becoming or being seen to be through our work and through our studies and their accomplishments. 00:14:55.379 --> 00:15:00.860 And so, Robert Bella calls this expressive individualism, that work is a marketplace in which 00:15:00.860 --> 00:15:06.679 we compete to actually establish our value. On the other hand, the other script that the culture tells 00:15:06.679 --> 00:15:14.039 us is that work is the necessary drudgery to endure in order to get to the real life, to get to pleasure. 00:15:14.039 --> 00:15:19.799 That's the other script, I think, that I see most often. And so, for many of us, we're there. We're 00:15:19.799 --> 00:15:26.059 not in jobs that we like. We haven't arrived at the ambitions that we had desired in our earlier lives. 00:15:26.360 --> 00:15:34.039 And so, we put up with work and we live for the hours off. We go to work in order to eat and to put a 00:15:34.039 --> 00:15:41.659 roof over our heads. And the real struggle with that is that the biggest block of your waking life, 00:15:41.659 --> 00:15:45.120 180,000, 90,000, I should say, hours, 00:15:46.199 --> 00:15:51.000 exist under that script to have slightly better holidays in Tenerife. 00:15:52.600 --> 00:15:56.819 And that's not a very powerful answer to the question of why do we work? 00:15:58.039 --> 00:16:04.860 And so, script one makes work carry far too much weight. Script two gives your work far too little worth, 00:16:05.399 --> 00:16:10.379 far too little meaning. And I want to come to sort of the climax of the evening by saying 00:16:10.379 --> 00:16:18.139 the Christian gospel answers both those problems so well. Now, the Christian gospel, the good news, 00:16:18.379 --> 00:16:25.279 is about the love of God set upon us even though we rebelled against His entire script for our 00:16:25.279 --> 00:16:31.939 existence from the very beginning. And it's a movement of God in grace, mercy, and forgiveness 00:16:31.939 --> 00:16:37.460 towards us in every way. And there's lots of ways of talking about the gospel, but here's one of them. 00:16:37.460 --> 00:16:44.160 We were made by the divine craftsmen to live and to work with God, the grand worker, 00:16:44.700 --> 00:16:50.240 in a partnership and loving relationship that would endure forever in a space where our work 00:16:50.240 --> 00:16:56.780 would only ever be peaceful, full of fruit and harmony. And when we turned from Him, we put so 00:16:56.780 --> 00:17:04.140 many other things in the place of Him. We are made to worship, and so we worshiped often our work 00:17:04.140 --> 00:17:10.620 and the value that it brings to us. We said, I don't want to receive my name from you, God. I want to 00:17:10.620 --> 00:17:16.500 make a name for myself. And so many of us have turned work into that object of divine worship 00:17:16.500 --> 00:17:24.060 instead of actually following the God that made us. The Bible calls that sin. And Jesus Christ, 00:17:24.160 --> 00:17:31.060 the Son of God, came into the world, and He stood in our place. He stood in the gap. He lived the life we 00:17:31.059 --> 00:17:36.579 should have lived. He died the death that that great cosmic crime against God deserves. And He rose 00:17:36.579 --> 00:17:42.779 again from the dead, promising a life of work and fruition that is beyond the drudgery of the curse 00:17:42.779 --> 00:17:47.039 of work that stands right today. But here's where I really want you to focus, and it's simply this, 00:17:47.460 --> 00:17:52.639 that when you follow Jesus Christ and you trust Him and you see the goods of the gospel and that you 00:17:52.639 --> 00:17:59.220 were made by this divine God who is a great craftsman and worker, the main concept is that you are 00:17:59.220 --> 00:18:07.900 adopted into a family, the family of God with brothers and sisters that says that your status and your 00:18:07.900 --> 00:18:15.400 worth is not something you earn. It is a gift. And there is such a freedom in that proclamation. 00:18:15.860 --> 00:18:21.460 It is that your identity and status, your anthropological value, who you are most fundamentally 00:18:21.460 --> 00:18:30.240 is received, not achieved. Now, here's why that matters. First, contra the Babylonian and Greek 00:18:30.240 --> 00:18:37.519 scripts for how the gods relate to humanity, how the gods are perceived as people who never work their 00:18:37.519 --> 00:18:44.799 living lives of endless luxury. The God of the Bible came into this world, and He was a carpenter. 00:18:46.200 --> 00:18:50.700 You know, He had calluses upon His hands for all the hard work that He did throughout His 00:18:50.700 --> 00:18:59.259 vocational life. And that's so significant because when He went to the cross, a crown of thorns, 00:18:59.380 --> 00:19:04.380 you'll know the Christian story, the crown of thorns was placed upon His head. And why? It's because in 00:19:04.380 --> 00:19:11.160 the heart of the story of the cross, God was saying to us that the very representation of the curse of 00:19:11.160 --> 00:19:16.180 work all the way back at the beginning of history, the thorns and thistles that rise up against us, 00:19:16.180 --> 00:19:23.400 He bore it upon His brow, thorns and thistles. And it's a pronouncement that in His death and then 00:19:23.400 --> 00:19:29.960 in His resurrection, He was going to reverse all the drudgery and problems that sin has brought into 00:19:29.960 --> 00:19:36.200 this world around the concept of work. So, the second thing, and this is script number one, 00:19:36.640 --> 00:19:42.039 this gospel tells you that because your identity can be received, not achieved, because first off, 00:19:42.039 --> 00:19:48.500 you are made in God's image, you are of such value. And because if you follow Christ, you can 00:19:48.500 --> 00:19:54.879 have a promise of life and an adopted family with God forever and a land of fruitfulness and fruition 00:19:54.879 --> 00:20:00.920 all your days. It says to you something like what William Temple says in his great line. He says, 00:20:00.980 --> 00:20:08.659 I know now my worth is what I am worth to God, and that's a marvelous, great deal, for Christ died for 00:20:08.660 --> 00:20:14.000 me. And that means your work, you're actually free. You're free. You're free from going to work to 00:20:14.000 --> 00:20:19.320 prove yourself. You don't have to anymore. The gospel isn't about whether your work is good, 00:20:19.360 --> 00:20:24.600 your performance is good. The gospel is about whether you need your performance to save you. 00:20:24.660 --> 00:20:28.900 And it says, no, you don't. And that means you don't need work to be your fundamental identity. 00:20:29.080 --> 00:20:32.460 You don't have to go there for your fundamental worth. You have a received identity, 00:20:32.460 --> 00:20:39.380 not an achieved identity. And then lastly, it tells you that there's freedom then from script two, 00:20:39.500 --> 00:20:46.799 from drudgery. So some of us remember script two, we go to work Monday to Friday. Work is nothing but 00:20:46.799 --> 00:20:52.840 a type of dying for us in order to get to the holidays. It's the price of the weekend, our labor. 00:20:53.799 --> 00:21:01.059 The gospel says, this life is not all there is. And it says that because Jesus Christ rose from the dead, 00:21:01.059 --> 00:21:08.799 your life and your work are done before a God who sees and holds on to the preciousness of all that 00:21:08.799 --> 00:21:14.559 you've given in your work life. And the New Testament says astounding things like this when 00:21:14.559 --> 00:21:21.480 you follow Jesus, whatever you do now, work heartily as for the Lord and not just for men, 00:21:22.220 --> 00:21:27.240 knowing that from the Lord, you will receive the inheritance of your reward. Now, in other words, 00:21:27.319 --> 00:21:30.179 what Christianity says to you is that because of the power of Christ's resurrection, 00:21:30.180 --> 00:21:37.220 God becomes your ultimate boss, your realist boss. And that means that all of your earthly bosses are 00:21:37.220 --> 00:21:42.240 just relative. It doesn't mean you shouldn't go listen to them or something tomorrow, but it does 00:21:42.240 --> 00:21:49.120 mean that your earthly boss is of only some importance. But when you follow Jesus, God is 00:21:49.120 --> 00:21:53.740 actually the one you work for most acutely. And that means that you can wake up every day and say, 00:21:53.880 --> 00:21:59.080 if I'm a farmer, a miller, a baker, a lorry driver, or if you are stacking the shelves at Tesco, 00:21:59.079 --> 00:22:05.720 excuse me, Tesco at 6 a.m. every single day, you are how God is feeding the world. 00:22:07.079 --> 00:22:13.659 You see, what Christianity does is it says that even the most ordinary labor is so valuable 00:22:13.659 --> 00:22:19.439 because when you work for the Lord, you work for the Lord. And that means that if you're 00:22:19.439 --> 00:22:25.079 cleaning the ward after a hospital shift or you're stocking the shelves at 6 a.m., 00:22:25.079 --> 00:22:30.439 it is God's work that you're doing because God is using you to feed the world. That's the Christian 00:22:30.439 --> 00:22:36.659 perspective. And so, you nurses in the room, you go out and you do the work of the Lord because you 00:22:36.659 --> 00:22:42.759 help people find healing. You teachers, you do the work of education because God desires that all 00:22:42.759 --> 00:22:47.839 people grow in their knowledge of the world that He created. And if you're a cleaner, you are in the 00:22:47.839 --> 00:22:52.399 work of beautification because God cares about not only truth and goodness, but also beauty. 00:22:52.400 --> 00:22:57.380 And that means Christianity gives a new vision for the power of ordinary work. 00:22:58.240 --> 00:23:04.040 So, let me finish with this. Lastly, how Christianity makes your work matter. Your work 00:23:04.040 --> 00:23:08.040 does matter in the Christian perspective, and it's this. I think there's a deeper problem here, 00:23:08.759 --> 00:23:13.780 and it's the last thing I want to talk about. I think we all know that our work should matter, 00:23:13.780 --> 00:23:19.460 and we want it to matter, but we live in a city that is dominated by secular humanism, 00:23:19.460 --> 00:23:25.480 and some of us here are wrestling with that worldview, secular humanism, sometimes in spiritual 00:23:25.480 --> 00:23:31.799 forms, sometimes in materialistic forms. But if you're a secular humanist and you ascribe to 00:23:31.799 --> 00:23:37.880 some form of materialism, the truth of that story is that one day you will die, and one day we all will 00:23:37.880 --> 00:23:45.299 die. But then, as the scientists tell us in that story, the sun will experience solar death, and we will 00:23:45.299 --> 00:23:51.960 either freeze or burn, one of the two, all of this planet. And one day, if you ask the question, 00:23:52.059 --> 00:23:57.419 does your work matter, the best thing you could say is, it did just a little bit for just a little 00:23:57.419 --> 00:24:03.639 while, and one day it will not at all, and that's to be sure. Bertrand Russell was very honest about 00:24:03.639 --> 00:24:07.759 this, the great atheist in the early 20th century. In 1903, listen to what he writes. 00:24:07.759 --> 00:24:16.019 All the labors of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human 00:24:16.019 --> 00:24:24.000 genius are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system. Only on the firm foundation 00:24:24.000 --> 00:24:31.500 of an unyielding despair can the soul's habitation henceforth be safely built. Now, just to translate 00:24:31.500 --> 00:24:37.779 that, he says, the only thing you can do if you're honest as a secular humanist is build the entire, 00:24:38.079 --> 00:24:44.619 the entire life, your entire soul's habitation, as he puts it, on the logic of unyielding despair, 00:24:45.019 --> 00:24:52.119 because everything is just going to die. Every cathedral, every symphony that's been written, 00:24:52.319 --> 00:24:57.680 every hospital that's been built to care for loved ones, it doesn't mean anything in the grand 00:24:57.680 --> 00:25:07.920 death of the sun. Now, is that livable? Is that existentially satisfying? And I want to say that 00:25:07.920 --> 00:25:12.480 the Bible also offers a very different picture, and it's that because of the resurrection of Jesus 00:25:12.480 --> 00:25:19.740 Christ, there will be a renewal of all things, a new heavens and a new earth, and the promise of that 00:25:19.740 --> 00:25:25.660 life, that everlasting life, is God is making all things new, not new things, and that means that we 00:25:25.660 --> 00:25:32.560 will carry forth into that world as workers that experience the joy of what it must be like, what it 00:25:32.560 --> 00:25:40.320 will be like to work without any sense of curse, and pure joy, and pure fruitfulness. And I love the 00:25:40.320 --> 00:25:47.040 story that J.R.R. Tolkien wrote that captures this, that's been used by many on this topic of faith and work. 00:25:47.860 --> 00:25:55.040 Tolkien, the writer of The Lord of the Rings, he wrote a little story in the 1940s for a newspaper 00:25:55.039 --> 00:26:01.200 at that time, he felt like he was never going to finish The Lord of the Rings. World War II had 00:26:01.200 --> 00:26:06.759 started, he was captured up and helping serve for the war, though he was not a soldier, only in the 00:26:06.759 --> 00:26:13.579 first war, not the second. But he also had created so many subplots for The Lord of the Rings that he 00:26:13.579 --> 00:26:17.700 was finding no way to bring them all back together again. And if you've read The Lord of the Rings or any 00:26:17.700 --> 00:26:24.299 of the Tolkien works, you know how true that must have been. And he was in a sense of depression and 00:26:24.299 --> 00:26:31.619 despair, and he wrote this little story called Leaf by Niggle. And this story is about a man who's a 00:26:31.619 --> 00:26:36.720 painter, and it clearly represents Tolkien himself. And the word niggle that he chose in the Oxford 00:26:36.720 --> 00:26:42.740 Dictionary at the time meant a person who fiddles and can't finish their work and is always 00:26:42.740 --> 00:26:47.839 procrastinating. And Tolkien very much said, that is me. And he believed that he would die without 00:26:47.839 --> 00:26:53.960 finishing The Lord of the Rings and that the decades he had spent writing new languages for it would be 00:26:53.960 --> 00:27:02.180 absolutely worthless. And so in this story, Leaf, this little guy, Niggle, who's a painter, he knows 00:27:02.180 --> 00:27:07.960 that death is coming for him, and he decides that he's going to paint one last great masterpiece, and 00:27:07.960 --> 00:27:14.059 it's a great tree. He envisions this tree, and so he sets out this massive canvas. It's so big that he has 00:27:14.059 --> 00:27:23.039 to use a ladder to get up to the top of it. And he then gets distracted, and his neighbor keeps coming 00:27:23.039 --> 00:27:28.960 over and asking him for help, and the local church asks him to serve in a thousand ways. And death 00:27:28.960 --> 00:27:34.579 finally comes for him in the story, and death takes him, and he goes on the long journey, as Tolkien writes 00:27:34.579 --> 00:27:43.819 it. And all he ever did on this great canvas was a tiny little leaf, not even close to something like 00:27:43.819 --> 00:27:50.460 a tree, but he was very good at painting leaves. And so he painted this one little leaf, and in sort of 00:27:50.460 --> 00:27:57.019 this journey of despair towards death, the story goes on, and the canvas eventually was chopped up and used to 00:27:57.019 --> 00:28:04.539 patch a neighbor's roof, and the leaf was cut out of it, and eventually made it into a relatively unknown 00:28:04.539 --> 00:28:09.599 museum somewhere in England that no one cared about. And eventually the museum burned down. 00:28:10.779 --> 00:28:18.460 And so this character is thinking in his death, nobody is ever going to care. My work means nothing. And 00:28:18.460 --> 00:28:25.700 he gets into the heavenly realm, and he sees in the heavenly realm a tree, a real tree, 00:28:25.700 --> 00:28:33.299 and he realizes that is my tree. That is the tree that I always had hoped to paint. And there it is. 00:28:33.340 --> 00:28:39.160 And he exclaimed, it is a gift of God. Now here's the point of the story, and that story has been told 00:28:39.160 --> 00:28:45.220 to so many people, and I think workers find it very moving. God in the Christian imagination takes the 00:28:45.220 --> 00:28:51.319 smallest contribution that you offer, and boy, are our contributions small. He takes the smallest 00:28:51.319 --> 00:28:55.180 contribution you offer, and he turns it into something that only he can. 00:28:55.700 --> 00:29:00.019 In a way that we don't even understand in the next life. He takes the smallest things we do 00:29:00.019 --> 00:29:06.720 in this life, and somehow he is weaving the story of our work into a grand story of work in the new 00:29:06.720 --> 00:29:11.759 heavens and the new earth that is beyond our imagination. There is a hope that everything 00:29:11.759 --> 00:29:19.220 you do in this life matters so much to God and to the next life. And I want to invite you tonight into 00:29:19.220 --> 00:29:25.600 that story and to consider that story and say to you that I think Christianity makes intellectual sense 00:29:25.600 --> 00:29:33.559 of work. It makes work practically livable without the despair of finding all your value in it or 00:29:33.559 --> 00:29:40.920 merely living in drudgery. But it also settles that existential problem we have to really matter. 00:29:40.920 --> 00:29:48.039 And when you see your work in the light of God, God says it does. Work for the Lord. And so I want to 00:29:48.039 --> 00:29:52.860 invite you to try on that story and see if it fits. See if it fits for your life and in your life. 00:29:54.120 --> 00:29:59.620 Thank you for listening to that. I want to give you a couple invitations, a few invitations. I'm so glad 00:29:59.620 --> 00:30:06.580 you came. Keep thinking. Maybe for somebody in the room, Christ is knocking at the door of your life, 00:30:06.579 --> 00:30:07.699 and we'd love to talk to you about that.