The Way We Work | Kylen Perry

Porch, how are we doing? Are we doing okay? Great to see you. Man! If I could express the same sentiment in return, with that sort of enthusiasm, I would. It's so good to see you. I'm so glad you all would join us here this evening. Not just those of you here in the room. Of course we're glad to see you, but also all of you who are tuning in with us online. Porch.Live nation, everywhere you are, we're so glad you're here with us this evening.

I've said it before. I'll say it again, and you'll hear it at some point in the future. We believe God can meet with any person at any time and in any place, and that includes you. So, thanks so much for being a part of it. Special shout-out to Porch.Live Tulsa, Boise, and Indy. We're so grateful for what God is doing there.

Well, it was eighth grade when I experienced my first official year of basketball tryouts. For the first time in my and my peers' lives, not everyone would make a team and be slotted to play, but only those who were talented enough to make the roster. Listen. Those of you who cheered, I'm not delusional. At the time, I knew I wasn't the best guy on the court. I wasn't the star-studded playmaker. I wasn't the bona fide starter to the team.

Just to be frank, I genuinely deserved to ride the pine. That was the level of my ability at the time. But what I wanted was to make the team. I loved the sport. I desperately wanted to make my way on, and I decided to game the system. So I asked a good friend of mine who was a year older than I was, "Hey, when you tried out for the team a year ago, what did y'all do? What did tryouts look like? That way, I can learn what to do so I can make sure to get on the team."

He told me they did three things. They did something called the Mikan Drill, which is where you stand underneath the hoop and work your right hand and left hand. You just put the ball into the basket. Left-handed and right-handed layups. I had no experience with left-handed layups, so I had to learn how to use my left hand very quickly. Then lastly were shots from the elbow. So, I learned the three things I was supposed to do. He told me what I needed to know.

I'll just cut to the chase. I became a master at all three of these things. So, the day of tryouts came, and I crushed it. I don't think I missed a single shot. I made every single layup. I looked like a savant with my left hand. Because I did, to my coach's surprise and my own, I made the A team. Yeah, man. Everything was going incredibly…that is, until the season began and we started playing real games.

You see, it didn't take long for my coaches to realize I wasn't all that I appeared the day I showed up to tryouts. Although I knew what to do in tryouts, I didn't know how to actually play the game in the heat of real competition. I was exposed, and I suffered the consequences of that exposure. I was unceremoniously demoted from the A team to the B team, and then I was demoted from the B team to the C team.

Now, why do I tell you that? Because in life, we often want someone to just tell us what to do, and we minimize the importance of learning how to play the game. In no area of life is this truer than in the area of work. Just like me asking for the secrets to crack the code on tryouts, we often want someone to help us crack the code on what we need to do so we can be successful, actuate our potential, achieve our dreams, make some kind of difference, and leave a mark on the world.

If you look at the data, it actually backs this up. Deloitte recently did a report in 2024 that said Millennials and Gen Z in the workplace are mostly driven by a purpose-driven mentality. We want purpose-driven work. By and large, for every one of us in here, this is what we desire. Just under 90 percent of young adults agreed, "I want purpose in my job. I don't want to just be performance-oriented; I want to be purpose-oriented." Which isn't a bad thing. I actually think that's a good thing. If you read the Bible, it's even more so. It's a God thing.

If you're a follower of Jesus, what you often consider when you think about your work is that God does have purpose for you wherever it is you spend your time from 9:00 to 5:00, Monday to Friday. What you probably think, if you're a follower of Jesus, is that your purpose on the job is to fulfill the Great Commission. It's to make disciples of every cubicle. That's kind of your mentality, which is spot on and correct, yet I would say, though it is correct, it's actually not complete. We not only have one mandate for our work; we have two.

You see, God does care about the people you work around, but he also cares about the work you do. In the very first chapter of the Bible, he tells us we should rule over all the earth, that as his viceroys, his image bearers, those made in the image of God, we should go and subdue the earth. We should cultivate culture, we should build structure, and we should produce beauty. It's good that you want a job that's filled with purpose, but God is looking at you and saying, "Hey, I've already filled your job with purpose. You need look no further."

That's why, whether you're a teacher, an IT guy, an attorney, an accountant, a plumber, a carpenter, or a construction worker, you can be convinced that in God's eyes, it matters far less what you do and much more how you do it. So then, how are we supposed to work? That's what I want to talk to you about tonight. To do so, we're going to be in the book of Ephesians. I just want to walk us through a passage of Scripture where the apostle Paul is going to help some subordinates learn how to honor their masters.

By this point in the book of Ephesians, he has already unpacked this idea of a divine and radical grace of God. Any person, Jew or Gentile, can place their faith in Jesus, and they can be forgiven of their sins in a moment. You can have salvation by simply professing him as Lord. It was dark for you. You were facing a difficult day. You had no hope on your own, yet Jesus stepped into your story and saved you. But he didn't just save you by yourself; he saved you into his family.

As you keep reading, you see that Paul talks about not just the purpose you live for but also the unity of the body, which is what we find as we come to chapters 5 and 6. He talks about parents and children and husbands and wives, and as we come to the section we're in tonight, he's going to talk about masters and bondservants.

Ephesians 6:5: "Bondservants, obey your earthly masters with fear and trembling, with a sincere heart, as you would Christ…" Does anybody in here have a different translation that doesn't say bondservant? Yeah. What does it say? Slave. Which, for some of us, if we read that, we immediately get hung up on it, and there's good reason for that. That word is loaded with so much historical context, even personal context for many of us.

So, it's important for us to clarify. Is Paul condoning slavery? No. Far from it. In fact, if you study through chapters 5 and 6, you will see these other relational constructs God has ordained. As you look at the way husbands relate to wives and parents relate to children, you see that Paul references in each a creational order to things. He takes it back to God's original design as he unpacks those two different relationship structures, but he does not reference a creational order when he is talking about bondservants.

What does that all mean? This was never a part of God's design. Slavery was never a part of God's plan. It was not something he schemed up and then unleashed on the world. It's far from within his realm of reason. Now, I don't have time to unpack what slavery looked like in the first century, nor give you a dissertation of the differences between it and what we see in the 1800s, 1900s, and in human trafficking today. What I will say very briefly, just to give us some handles to hold, is that this looked very different than what we understand as modern slavery.

In the Roman Empire, many slaves…not all, but many of them…would enter into servitude voluntarily, whether through debt bondage, where I had money I owed, so I would choose to enter into an agreement where I could work my way out of debt, or through a process they called self-selling, where I would sell myself into your servitude so I could ascend up the social ladder, find my way into Roman citizenship, avail myself to new opportunity, and eventually get free of the Roman tax system. What you see is that many people would enter into servitude by way of their own self-selection. They would choose to do so.

Now, this isn't a comprehensive explanation of what you see servitude is in the Roman Empire, but it is important for us to understand, because it is contextually relevant to why we're talking about work from this passage in specific. I'm not defending servitude. Again, we can talk about it through our podcast or something different at another time. If you have questions, you can come and visit with me about it. This is not a raving endorsement for it.

What we do need to know is it has some similarities to an employer/employee relationship. It's, when agreed upon, mutually beneficial for both parties, according to what we see in this text. There is a definitive end date. It's not something that perpetually goes on and on and on. It will eventually end. What you see is that both report to an authority, and they're contractual.

So, Paul's instruction for them is a useful instruction for us, because as he talks to them, he knows many of these people serve in jobs of medicine or accounting or business or philosophy or civil service or even the emperor's own household. They're in positions that would look really similar to some of the positions we here tonight are working in.

So, he's going to instruct them on what it looks like for them to interact in their relationship. It's helpful for us, because we need to know how to interact with other people in our working relationships. So, what does he say? What's the way to work? Well, he tells us, starting in verse 5. We'll read it again. "Bondservants, obey your earthly masters with fear and trembling, with a sincere heart, as you would Christ…"

He gives them the command to obey, which, if you study in the Greek, just means to come under the authority of someone else, that I am positionally subordinate to someone. And the way I'm supposed to engage with them is fear and trembling. What does that mean? Does it mean you should be nervous and anxious at the fact that your boss is reigning and ruling over the top of you? No, that's not what you should feel.

When you see those words combined throughout the Scripture, it always is pointing to a mentality of reverence or respect, which brings us to our first point. We respect those we work with, even if they don't deserve it. You shouldn't be afraid, nor should you tremble at the sight of your boss. You should respect them, though. Think about it like this.

If Michael Jordan walked onto the court of your local LA Fitness, there's not a soul in here who would be like, "Mike! What's up, dude?" and then casually go about their business. No one would do that. It would demand some kind of response. You would start to feel your heart beating really fast in your chest, your palms would begin to get sweaty, and your voice would start to get really high-pitched, because you've never talked to someone of this sort of caliber.

You see, because he is an authority in that domain, you don't just recognize him; you respond to him. You put some respect on his name, because he has earned it, because he is the greatest, whether you disagree or not. Now, it's important to point out here that Paul doesn't say anything about your boss or manager or supervisor deserving your respect, which can be a really hard pill for some of us to swallow.

Some of you are sitting under the supervision of someone who belittles the people who work for them. They speak demeaning to those who report up. They take credit when they actually didn't do the work. You have people you report to whom you look at and are like, "Man, they don't deserve my respect whatsoever." Paul is saying that's not the problem, because according to Paul, we know they're still deserving of our respect. Peter says in 1 Peter 2:18, "Servants, be subject to your masters with all respect, not only to the good and gentle but also to the unjust."

I remember one of my really good friends reported to a boss who was the epitome of evil. To top it off, they claimed to be a believer. This was the type of boss who would bang tables, throw papers, and get crazy eyes whenever something would go wrong. What I saw my friend do as they engaged with their boss is I saw they did not indulge the temptation of their coworkers.

Where everybody was standing around the water cooler and plotting a coup, how to overthrow this evil dictator, they wouldn't do so. They decided, instead, to show respect even when respect wasn't deserved. The thing that was crazy for me was this friend of mine was the subject of this person's greatest animosity, yet they chose to consistently and persistently honor them. You see, this friend of mine respected the Lord's lead in her life, so she respected the leader over her life. She knew God was the one calling the shots.

In Daniel, chapter 2, it says, "Blessed be the name of God forever and ever, to whom belong wisdom and might. He changes times and seasons; he removes kings and sets up kings; he gives wisdom to the wise and knowledge to those who have understanding…" What is Daniel saying? God is the only one in control.

So, let me ask you… Are you working like you believe that is true? Are you working like you actually believe God is in control? Better yet, are you working in such a way that other people might believe he's in control, that he's the one calling the shots? You're so willing to walk with a kind of humility and servant-heartedness that as things do go haywire and decisions do go sideways and you become the subject of someone's scrutiny, you continue to find that you're unshaken. You're immovable. You're a constant fixture of faithfulness.

Is that true of you and your story? Because that's going to lead people to believe something about the authority over your life. Not just the visible authority but the invisible authority in your life. If you don't respect the visible authority, they're not going to respect the invisible authority in your world. They're not going to believe in him. Your witness depends on this. It's critical. People won't want to believe in Jesus if you don't work like you believe in Jesus.

That's why when everyone else is gossiping in the break room, you don't hop in there, throw in your two cents, and make sure they hear that you agree, that you deserve to be sympathized with because of the hardships you've faced. No. You choose to walk the other direction. That's why whenever you find that your boss comes down hard on you…they're delivering harsh criticism…you don't get defensive. You don't bow up. "How dare you?"

You don't just respond and retaliate. Instead, you choose to listen to the things they say, respond with great grace, and then seek to be better. Or when your boss makes a really bad call or a decision becomes disastrous, you don't choose to relish in their failure. "Serves you right." You don't celebrate their defeat. You offer to help. You seek to support even when others may not be willing to themselves.

Now listen. Does that mean that if you're in a tough work environment you should just stay there? I don't know. Maybe. Maybe not. What I do know is that God is the one in control of your story. You can rely on him. You continue where you are until he makes clear you should go somewhere else. You be steadfast in your work. You be respectful to your boss. You continue to pray and ask God for his guidance. He will lead you where he wants you.

Here's the thing, Porch. Many of us want desperately to be out of where we are when God has put us there on purpose, and he's waiting for us to fulfill that purpose before he moves us elsewhere. Have you considered it or are you just so unsettled? "This is horrible. I can't believe this is my reality. My circumstances could not get worse."

Or have you registered to the fact that "God, you probably have me here for a reason. I should probably stand where my feet are set. I should probably be ambitious about today and leave you entrusted with tomorrow. What is it, God, that you want from me right now? Let me be diligent to accomplish whatever that is." This is the first way we work. The way we work matters, and our work should be marked with respect for others, even when they don't deserve it.

The second way we work is seen in verse 5. Again, it says, "Bondservants, obey your earthly masters with fear and trembling…" Then it says, "…with a sincere heart, as you would Christ…" The second thing Paul tells us is we give our best at work, even when we don't feel like it. That word sincere means single, which means you work with a singleness of heart.

You don't have a job over here, but you really want a job over there, because that would be a divided affection. That would be a divided heart. That's not how we work. We work with a singularity of affection. All of our being and all of our feeling are pointed at what God has given. We work where we are. We work wherever God wills.

Why is that? Because we can trust him. Romans 8 tells us God works all things together for the good of those who are called according to his purposes, which can be a really tough pill to swallow. Can we just level with each other? Some of you are in here, and you hear that… "Man, God works for my good, and he has purposed it, despite the fact that it's so miserable. That doesn't make any sense, Kylen. My job couldn't be any worse. How is it that God could put me in such a horrible situation, yet he could stand on the promise that this is actually for my good, that this is according to his plan and purpose? How is that true?"

Well, I will just tell you this. If that's you in the room, you're in really good company, because the Bible is filled with people who could agree to that set of circumstances. That was their reality. Just think about it. Daniel had a horrible boss in King Nebuchadnezzar, Joseph was abused repeatedly by people in power over him, and David was hunted down by the guy he was supposed to succeed, yet what you find is as these brothers continued to trust the Lord and do the best they could with where they were, God provided for them. He even promoted them.

Daniel becomes the ruler over the entire province of Babylon. He even becomes the chief over Nebuchadnezzar's wise men. Joseph, who we talked about last week, becomes the CFO over Egypt, and David is the king over all Israel. Now, that does not necessarily mean that if I trust God and work hard I'm going to be promoted into C-level status. No, that's not what this is saying. That's not what these examples are pointing toward.

What it is saying is he will take care of you. He'll provide for you, which some of you need to hear, because you're so desperately trying to provide for yourself. In the face of your hardship, in the face of your difficulty, as people use you and abuse you and wring you for all you're worth but never give you anything in return, you need to know God sees you, and he's at work in the waiting. He has a plan. He will bring it to pass, because he works for your good.

Proverbs 16:3 says, "Commit your work to the Lord, and your plans will be established." Do you hear the promise in that? You commit your work to the Lord, and your plans will be established. God will take care of you. He loves to use those who work hard, who give their best effort, who try what other people wouldn't.

That's why we, as the people of God… We're not "one foot in and one foot out." We're "best foot forward." We're giving everything we have to wherever God has us. We don't just pass the time until 5:00 hits and…"Praise God!"…happy hour somewhere, and now we can finally go to the gym. That's not our mentality. We're making the most of the time we have.

We don't grumble and complain when we're asked to do something meaningless. "Oh, this is the worst. They always ask me to do this. I wish I didn't have to do these things that they perpetually and consistently ask." No, that's not our response. We find meaning in the mundane. That's the response of the people of God.

Why? Why do we do this? How is it that we could have such a radically reoriented perspective from the rest of the world? The world doesn't do this. They don't respond like this. How can we do it? Why is this our reality? Because we're not bondservants to any man; we are bondservants to Christ. That's what Paul says in verse 6. "…not by the way of eye-service, as people-pleasers, but as bondservants of Christ, doing the will of God from the heart…"

That word for eye-service… It's really funny. Paul probably made it up. He's trying to communicate to us that we don't just work hard when other people are watching. You don't give your best effort whenever your boss is around. That's not the mentality. We work when no one is watching. We give our best even when we're in solitude, when we find ourselves in isolation, when no one is around.

Here's the thing. If you've ever opened a spreadsheet at your computer just to make it look like you're really busy so your boss doesn't realize you're actually checking Instagram on the side, you might be guilty of eye-service. If you're the person who has opened up a dozen different tabs on your browser to hide the fact that you're online shopping, but they'll never know because you can't actually read what's in the tab it's so shrunken and small… You laugh because you've done this.

I remember watching March Madness, and there was this feature called the boss button. If you were watching the 2:00 tip-off, you could just hit the boss button, and a spreadsheet would pop up. Your boss would have no idea that you were actually watching basketball instead of working very diligently and doing the best you could for the good of the rest of the company. If you've done any of these things, you're guilty of eye-service. You're guilty of people-pleasing. Here's the thing, Porch. That's really dishonest.

Recently, Brooke and I were picking up a rental car in Colorado. We made our way to the rental car agency, and the attendant was so nice. He was engaged with us. He was interested. "Man, what brings you to town?" He was laughing at all of my jokes. I loved this guy…that is, until he tried to sell us on rental car insurance. I said, "Man, we're okay." I refused to opt in to the toll tag service they use, and I didn't really want to prepay for gas.

I saw his attitude immediately shift. He went from being my best friend to being a cold, hard salesman, someone who was just running me through the queue and trying to get me out the door so he could pull the next person forward. I realized in that moment, "Man, you don't care about me. I'm just a path to your paycheck. I'm just a figure for your commission."

Listen. I have no disrespect for the fact that the guy was doing his job, but where I take issue is that he was doing his job not out of concern or care for the customer; he was doing it out of concern and care for himself. So much so that he was adamant about me leaving him a review. He wrote his name down. Like, "Hey, man. Don't forget my name is Dan, spelled D-A-N." I know how to spell Dan or Bob or Jim or whatever it was. "I know. I've got it, brother." He was that adamant about getting something out of this exchange.

Too often, we do the same thing, but that shouldn't be the case, because if you're a follower of Jesus, you don't angle your way into some kind of role or finesse yourself into some sort of new opportunity or maneuver your way to be a part of that conversation in that room, a part of that board meeting. That's not what we do. That's duplicitous. It's not singular at heart. We don't just work hard whenever other people can see us, because here's the thing: the one who assigned you the work never loses sight of you.

You think you're taking job orders from some boss? No. Your life is carefully orchestrated by a sovereign God, and he has put you where you are. I promise there is good in it. There is redemptive purpose behind it, even if it is difficult. But if you think no one is watching, you are grievously mistaken, because he's always watching. He sees everything.

I know that can feel really intense. "Dude, it's not that big of a deal. Doesn't everybody do this?" Here's the thing. We don't follow everybody; we follow Jesus. We don't live like the crowds. We live like Christ in that his pursuit of you and me was not motivated to impress the opinions of other people; it was motivated to express the love of God. That's how we live. We live in light of the way he has cared for us.

How did he express the love of God? He lavished it upon a people who were unworthy. He gave his very best effort. He was perfect, and he gave so much that he would lay down his own life for you and me, a people who were unlovely, unwelcoming, undesirable, and underwhelming. He cared that much. If he's willing to go that far, go that hard, we should do the same.

But that's not the only way we work. Yes, we give respect to those we work alongside, and yes, we give our best effort when we are at work, but also, we care about our work even if we don't love it. That's what Paul points to when he gets to verse 7. "…rendering service with a good will as to the Lord and not to man…"

I remember when my dad first taught me to cut the yard. He was adamant about us doing it a very specific way. We would cut in straight lines, edge it very carefully, and then we would go to blow and make sure everything was picked up at the end, which was always the most frustrating part for me.

"I get it. The grass is tall. We have to cut this thing down. It's hanging over the edge of the line. We have to edge this thing up. But why do we have to blow all of the grass into piles and pick it up? No one does that. Let's just blow it onto the street like everybody else does and let the traffic take care of our problem. Why do you care so much, Pop, about blowing this stuff into piles, sweeping it into a dustpan, and throwing it into a trash bin?"

Because where I was just focused on getting the job done, he was focused on getting the job done right. He cared. He cared about our house. He wanted it to look nice for my mom. He cared about our neighbors in that he didn't just want to blow grass and make it a problem for someone else to deal with. And he cared about me in that he wanted to show me the way I should work, that if I'm going to apply myself, even to something I don't love, like cutting the yard, it doesn't mean I can't do it well. It doesn't mean I don't do it well.

Why do I tell you that? Because that's what Paul is talking about here in this verse, specifically, that we should render service with a good will, which can be confusing. If ever you're struggling to understand something in the Scripture, here's a good strategy: go grab another translation of the Bible and read it instead. See what another translation says about a passage of Scripture you find difficult.

I didn't know what a "good will" was, so I pulled up a different translation, and I saw that it's a good attitude. If you go and study the Greek, that's exactly what it means. It's to be enthusiastic or wholehearted in what you're doing, which means we don't just give our best effort when we work; we mean our best effort when we work. We mean it.

Here's the thing. When I say that, I know the reaction of some of you in the room is like, "But, Kylen, I don't love my job. I really don't. I'm meant for more. This isn't what I signed up to do. This doesn't meet my passions. It doesn't actualize my potential. It's not leading me into the sort of joy and satisfaction that I want to be true of my life. I don't love my job." But here's the thing: it doesn't mean you can't care about it. Again, God is less concerned about what you do and far more concerned about how you do it.

It's fascinating. When Gen Z was first entering the workforce in 2017, if you read any of the literature that was out there about this new generation that was arriving into the workforce, what you would read was that the hopes were really high. The potential was really great. Everybody expected this to be the next hardworking generation.

It was the product of things like our social sensitivity, our emphasis on ethics, our individuality, and our entrepreneurial spirit. People were even so bold as to say that Gen Z looked like the Greatest Generation, that generation from 1901 to 1928 or 1930 that really made America what it is, that advanced our society technologically and fought in World War II. Those are some big shoes to fill, yet there was the high hope that the young adults of America would do it.

What's fascinating is if you go and read articles in the last couple of years about our generation and the present workforce, what you find is that current American bosses have changed their tune. Instead of seeing us as the hardest-working generation, they've instead found many of us to be the hardest generation to work with. Why is that? Well, there's a lot we could say about it, and I won't give you all of the specifics of why that is the synopsis, but I will give you a blunt answer as to why that is the ultimate finding. It's this: if we don't love the work we do, we're really unwilling to do it.

That's why we're seeing some pretty alarming data on workplace disengagement within young adults. Gallup Consulting looked at the level of engagement amongst Millennials and Gen Z, and what they found was that just under a third, less than 32 percent of us, are actively engaged on our job. That's alarming. We're disengaged. We're deeply detached from our work.

Now let me be really clear in saying all this. I always think it's strange to try to define an entire generation of people by one set of characteristics. That feels like we're painting in too broad of strokes. It's a really wide array of people to paint under one set of values or descriptors. So, I'm not convinced that this is totally true, and I'm not convinced that it's totally true of those in this room. I know many of you, and you are hardworking people.

You struggle in difficult jobs, yet you burn the midnight oil. You give your very best effort. You show up and offer respect to the people you work with. I know this isn't conclusively true nor universally true in any sense, yet I do think it's so interesting, because it points to the reality that if we don't love our work, we're willing to disengage from it. Yet we've not been called to love our job; we've been called to care about our job. That's God's mandate for us as we see it from his Word.

You see, loving one's job is not a sufficient reason for whether we do our jobs well or not. We need something of more substance. So, what sort of substance do you lean on to help you when the days grow long and the times get tough? What substance undergirds your motivation to keep caring about your work? Well, it says in this verse we work for the Lord and not for man…not for some other man and not for you either. You don't work for yourself. You work for him.

You can care about a job that is unworthy of your affections because you work for a God who cares about a people unworthy of his affections. Do you want to learn how to do this well? Then you need only look to Jesus. Christ cared about us when we were riddled in sin, despicable with reputation, yet he still chose to care for us.

It was his heart to care for us when we were unworthy, so we can have a heart to care for those and those things in life that we deem to be unworthy. This is the response for those who have placed their faith in Jesus. Once you see him and you see him rightly, you can see them and see them rightly. You can move into the world the way he would have you move.

Paul, in a different letter, but saying a very similar idea, says in Colossians 3:23-24, "Whatever you do, work heartily, as for the Lord and not for men, knowing that from the Lord you will receive the inheritance as your reward." Which is really similar to what he says in verse 8. "…knowing that whatever good anyone does, this he will receive back from the Lord, whether he is a bondservant or is free."

Why do we work heartily with sincerity as if we truly care? Because we know this, Porch: if your job is hard, if your boss is difficult, if your coworkers are crazy, and somehow your working reality never gets better, you can be assured that you have an inheritance in Christ Jesus and it will get better. The moment you live in now is but a blip on the grand spectrum of your eternity if you've placed your faith in Christ.

Today, whatever your situation is, with Jesus it's the worst day you can ever know, because tomorrow it will get better, and the day after it will get better, and the day after it will improve, not because your circumstances get better and better and better, but you walk with Christ. You behold King Jesus, you become like him yourself, you belong to his people, and you believe what he's doing in the world. He's saving it, he's rescuing folks, he's pushing back darkness, he's setting captives free, and he has invited you to be a part of it.

What work is as worthy as that? No work. The beauty of it is everything Christ has come to do, which he has brought you into the fold of and called you and commissioned you to join in… All of those things happen wherever it is you work right now. Yes, you do get to help save souls and push back darkness. You get to establish God's kingdom on earth as it is in heaven. That's the beauty of the Scripture.

If you study the Bible, what you realize is God has big plans for work. Everything starts in a garden state, but everything ends in a city state. He's working the world through you and me to a place where culture is vibrant and society bursts with life and people are advanced, not to their own glory but to the glory of God.

The reason we know this inheritance is promised to us is we know that our peace in life is not found in our satisfaction on the job; it's found through our satisfaction in God. We know it's not found in our performance for our boss, but it's found in the performance of Christ on the cross. We know it's not found in the approval of any other person, but it's found in the approval of your King, that King who respected you.

When you and I were so unworthy of respect, he chose to pursue us anyway. He chose to leave the halls of heaven, move into our neighborhood, become like you and me, and love an unlovely people, riddled in sin, marked with depravity, and separated from God, yet sought after by a God who wanted to bring us close again. He respected us.

What you see in Christ is that he gave his best in life. He came to work, to do his utmost, to lay out as much as he could to provide for as many as he could by way of his own life. He didn't just come to be perfect on your behalf but to lay down that perfection upon the cross, absorbing the full consequence of God's wrath toward sin in himself, that any who place their faith in him wouldn't receive condemnation but would receive salvation and be saved.

We know he cared about us. He cared about a people who were unlovely, undesirable, and so very underwhelming to pursue. He cared enough to lay down his life yet take it up again and invite us to go with him where he now is. Friends, Jesus has shown you the way to work in that he has worked the way himself. Now place your faith in him and work in a way that's worthy of him too. Let me pray.

God, we love you. Lord, I know there are so many people here who come from such a wide array of work complications. There are so many people in here whose reality at the office is horrible. Their bosses are difficult, their coworkers are chaos, and they don't know the way through it. I know there are so many in here who have looked to their job to give them all the satisfaction they could want for in life.

I know there are some in here who have looked to their work and have said, "It'll be in my work that I'll finally feel like enough, that I'll finally measure up. Not for anybody else, but really just for myself, I'll finally feel like I'm worthy of the kind of love I've always wanted." God, I pray that people would know here that fullness of life is found in one place and one place alone, and that's your Son.

Deepness of soul satisfaction will not be curbed by some job and performance review, but it will be curbed only by you, King Jesus, and the enoughness so many long for has already been attested to through the life, death, and resurrection of our Savior. We love you, God. Would you work here in this time, please, I pray. Amen.