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Many of you have containers of lawn fertilizer or weed killer with the word “concentrate” on them. Colossians 3 is a concentrated version of the Christian life. It begins with our union with Christ, and ends focusing on the four key relationships for believers: church, marriage, family, and now work. Life is made up mostly of work. Even with a forty-hour work week, we spend over 100,000 hours of work in a lifetime. How does Christ’s supremacy reveal itself in your work week?
“I’m going to get him to sin within the first week.” That’s what Mitch said when he found out a preacher was joining his construction crew. I was the preacher. After pastoring for 13 years I took a job painting and staining doors and trim for new homes. That was one of the most interesting years of my life. Mitch didn’t know I sin in some way every day without him provoking me! I had a great time working with those lost guys. And I knew that whether I was preaching or painting, I was serving the Lord.
THE PROTESTANT / BIBLICAL WORK ETHIC
The Roman church of the Middle Ages divided people between the clergy and the rest of the people, called the laity. The priests and monks were doing God’s work; all the rest were doing secular work. The Reformation changed all this. Justification by faith alone liberated people from slavery to the church. You didn’t need the church to save you; Christ alone saves. Flowing right out of that great truth was the priesthood of every believer. No longer did you have to enter a monastery or become a priest in the church to serve God. Every believer is a priest and every occupation is sacred. Luther said, “If this truth could be impressed upon the poor people, a servant girl would dance for joy and praise and thank God.” When I took that year off from pastoring, people would ask me, “When are you getting back into the Lord’s work?” My response: “Brother, I’m in the Lord’s work. I’m staining these doors for Jesus!”
Do you believe your work is sacred? Maybe you’re studying bio-chemistry or pre-law or engineering or economics or medicine or nursing or teaching. Or perhaps you’re working in sales or dentistry (God bless you) or law enforcement or roofing or plumbing or accounting or construction or as an electrician or in food service or painting. If you know Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior, when you go off to work or to school tomorrow morning, you’re going off to serve your Master, Jesus Christ, or, as Todd Friel says, “Go serve your King!”
GOD CREATED US TO WORK
Before we dive into our passage, let’s remember a couple of things about work. First, God created us to work, to be productive. He put Adam in that garden and told him to keep it. Have you ever seen a garden that hasn’t been kept? Even before the fall into sin, God’s will was for man to work, to be productive. God didn’t make us to be lazy or live off the government. Socialism is a curse. Free money from the government doesn’t really help anyone. No economic system has elevated more people out of poverty than free enterprise and the capitalist system.
God says if you don’t work you don’t eat (2 Thessalonians 3:10). When we pray “give us this day our daily bread” God isn’t promising to parachute food into your back yard. You can’t work for your salvation. You are saved by grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone. But you do have to work for your daily bread, and that’s a good thing. God put worms in your back yard, but even the robins have to work to find them. You don’t see them laying around with beaks open waiting for a worm to crawl into it.
God made us to work and be productive, just as He worked for six days and said, “It is very good.” Ecclesiastes 2:24 says, “There is nothing better for a man than to eat and drink and tell himself that his labor is good.” You know how good you feel when you fix something? It usually takes me four or five times longer than it should, but I try. We have one of those touch lamps by the bed. It has three levels of light, but it quit working. I hesitantly ordered a repair kit. I’m not an electrician, so I reserved plenty of time to fix it. Attaching the right wires wasn’t easy and shoving the mess of wires back into the base of the lamp seemed just as difficult. The big question was, will it work? I screwed in the bulb, plugged it in, and guess what? IT WORKED! I probably won’t attempt to fix yours, but getting mine to work felt good. God made us to be productive and take a certain amount of humble pride in doing a good job.
WHAT ABOUT SLAVERY?
Verse 22 begins, “Slaves….” People wonder about slavery and the Bible. Slavery has been around since the beginning of world history. Jesus never condemned or approved slavery. He didn’t come to directly change human institutions. He never marched against tyranny or campaigned against moral and social ills. He wasn’t a “Social Justice Warrior” or a proto-Marxist provoking oppressed groups against oppressors. He came to solve a far deeper problem than slavery or human injustice. Far worse than physical slavery is the slavery of the heart to sin. And whether you were a slave in Paul’s day or the CEO of a multi-billion dollar company in 21st century America, you are a slave to sin and need Christ to set you free.
Martyn Lloyd-Jones is spot on here: “The church’s task primarily is to evangelize and to bring people to a knowledge of God. Then, having done that, she is to teach them how to live their life under God as His people. The church is not here to reform the world, for the world cannot be reformed.” The church preaches the gospel, God changes lives, and then individual Christians have influence in this world for change. Wilberforce became a Christian and as a Parliamentarian he fought the evils of slavery and worked hard to abolish it. His efforts succeeded in England in 1807. And of course we fought the bloody Civil War that brought an end to legal slavery in America. Sadly, much of the world still practices slavery of various kinds. If you want to know more about slavery, listen to the YouTube by Thomas Sowell on “The Real History of Slavery.” Sowell notes, “No other nation ended slavery in the same way and in so short a time as the United States did.”
Having said all this, what does God say to you and me as His people in the working world? What biblical teaching guides you as you leave for work tomorrow morning, or fulfill your responsibilities in your home, or head out to school or whatever you do to earn a living? God gives five ways to demonstrate the supremacy of Christ in the workplace.
By complete obedience
Colossians 3:22, Slaves, in all things obey those who are your masters on earth, not with external service, as those who merely please men, but with sincerity of heart, fearing the Lord.
Obey in all things. I’m sure slaves in that day, just as you and I today, were tempted to argue over what their bosses told them to do. “That’s dumb. I’m not doing that!” But God says that unless it is immoral, obey and do it. If your boss listens to reason, reason with him. My boss found work for me one day out in the subdivision. It had rained and thick patches of mud gathered along the concrete curbing. After about five or six hours of shoveling mud, my body said it was ready to go home. So I asked him if I could take off. He was a reasonable boss. Do you ever thank God that in His providence He allowed you to be born in this country, in this century? You could have been one of these slaves Paul was talking to in Colossae or a European captured by the Muslim pirates and sold into slavery into northern Africa in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
God says work with sincerity of heart. Don’t goof off until someone says, “He’s coming!” and then look like you’re really hard at it. That’s what “eye service” and “man pleasing” mean. There’s a lot of that in the working world. My construction boss would set up his transit and with his scope spy on his workers from across the way to see who is working and who’s not. Sincerity of heart means you are committed to doing the best job you can. Fearing the Lord means you work knowing God is keeping track and you’re accountable to Him. Your boss may not see you slacking off, milking the job, shopping on Amazon when you’re supposed to be working, but God does. Jonah Goldberg, a Jewish conservative, wrote in Suicide of the West: “The notion that God is watching you even when others are not is probably the most powerful civilizing force in all of human history.” Mr. Goldberg is not a Christian, but he spoke a ton of truth here. 1 Timothy 6:1-2 says if your boss is a Christian, don’t presume on him or her. In fact, serve them all the more!
By whole-hearted obedience
Colossians 3:23, Whatever you do, do your work heartily, as for the Lord rather than for men,
Heartily is literally “out of your soul.” Whatever you do, it doesn’t matter what as long as it’s legitimate work, work from your soul, your worship center for Christ rather than for men. There can be no shoddy workmanship here. Have you ever hired someone and their work was shoddy? We have. And the guy was a Christian. Then he got ticked off when we asked him to change something he’d done poorly. Shoddy workmanship has brought great tragedy and death to many.
God says we are to work as if Christ was our boss, and He is! He is your job inspector. You can tell your boss, “Sir, my goal here is to please you and do all I can to help you be successful, but I’m really working for someone else. His name is Jesus Christ.” Clean that office, plant those bushes, stain those doors, prepare that sermon, make those calls, decorate that room, write up that loan, and make a sale for Jesus Christ! When you make a mistake, you go back and make it right, whatever it takes.
What a difference this makes in how we think about work, right? Those 100,000 plus hours of work matter to God. Every job, every vocation, every career, as long as you are practicing integrity, honesty, faithfulness, and truthfulness, is noble and glorifying to God. You’re a new creation out there working away serving God. Ephesians 4:28 says, “He who steals must steal no longer (no longer cheating, lying, pilfering stuff, like hospital towels) but rather he must labor, performing with his own hands what is good, so that he will have something to share with one who has need.”
Work from your soul as service to Christ. Not griping and complaining, slandering the boss and all those other worthless employees. I sat in a counseling session with a young man who couldn’t hold a job. I wonder why. According to him, his boss was fat and slow, fellow workers were ignorant, painting was below his qualifications, and he wasn’t getting paid enough.
“Yes, but my job is sheer drudgery.” Glad you brought that up. Martyn Lloyd-Jones has something to say about drudgery. Tell yourself, “I am going to be a drudge for Christ’s sake. Perhaps someone looking at me and seeing me enjoying the drudgery, and doing it with a finesse, and with a glamour and a glory that the world can never produce, may suddenly be convinced and convicted of sin and may become an inquirer after the way of salvation.”
By Christ-pleasing obedience
Colossians 3:24, knowing that from the Lord you will receive the reward of the inheritance. It is the Lord Christ whom you serve.
These slaves had little or no property and received little or no compensation or appreciation. Calvin says the world puts little value on the labor of slaves, “but God esteems them as highly as the duties of kings.” Paul says, “Remember, this world is not your home. You may have nothing here, but you’ve got a reward awaiting you in heaven. Rather have nothing in this world for 60 or 70 years and die and inherit a glorious reward because you knew Christ, loved Him, served Him every day, rather than having billions of dollars to your name, dying without Christ, and facing an eternity in hell.
So whatever you do every day, whether it is drilling holes in sheet metal or cleaning people’s houses, you are drilling and cleaning for eternity. It isn’t so much what you do, but how you do it and whom you were serving. Did you do it to please the Lord? Your work matters to God.
Let’s add to this, no matter your age. I read about a barber, Anthony Mancinelli from New Windsor, NY. He said, “I advise a lot of people not to quit working.” He was still cutting hair at age 107, 40 hours a week! He died at 108 in 2019. One of our men here in this church is over 80 and every day he’s out in his shop working on high end furniture legs. Dan Jost is retired and working harder than ever. Even if you are retired, you still have Christ-pleasing work to do every day. Don’t just sit around watching Andy Griffith shows all day.
By enduring obedience
Colossians 3:25, For he who does wrong will receive the consequences of the wrong which he has done, and that without partiality.
God will allow people to mistreat you out there in that work jungle. Potiphar’s wife lied about Joseph and then the cupbearer forgot to tell the King about him for two more years. But this verse says no one gets away with injustice. That back-stabbing fellow worker or unreasonable boss will face the consequences of his or her nasty behavior.
God will exact justice on evil doers without partiality. God pays no attention to the color of his skin, the degrees behind his name, or his net worth. True justice will not come until Christ returns. But every wrong deed will face justice. None of us are innocent, but for believers, Christ received the consequences of our wrong! All our wrongs were judged in Him on that cross, for which we give thanks. But remember, no one gets away with injustice. And there has been an enormous amount of horrible injustice in this world. Many wicked people seem to have gotten away with their evil deeds. But they won’t. In the meantime, endure obedience unless you can legitimately change your situation. Paul says in 1 Corinthians 7:21, if you can become free, do that.
By mutual obedience
Colossians 4:1, Masters, grant to your slaves justice and fairness, knowing that you too have a Master in heaven.
Paul doesn’t overlook a word to the masters. He reminded Philemon that his slave Onesimus was now a brother and to treat him kindly. You may be a master, but you also have a Master in heaven! So treat your employees justly and fairly. Don’t show partiality. Today people in authority need to be reminded to do the right thing. If someone has merited a pay raise or higher position, don’t determine it based on their skin color or gender or even education. If they earned it, give it to them. That’s the way you want God to treat you. Just as employees are to obey their Lord, so is the Christian employer to live in the fear of God. Thank God for every Christian man or woman who invests in a business, hires employees to help them succeed, and treats them with grace and fairness.
Too many Christians fail to practice the supremacy of Christ in their daily work, as if somehow going to work isn’t as important to God as going to church or teaching a Bible study. Jesus Christ went up Calvary’s hill and died to change you as one of His people into a God-honoring worker. He died for your sins and reconciled you to God so that you could glorify God in your daily duties, whatever you do. Will you go to work tomorrow morning aware that you are serving Christ? You are going to do a sacred work. Go serve your King!