Start Thriving at Work

Good morning! Between services we were outside talking to people. I got almost a sunburn. What's going on? I got a tan. You got a... I got it, yeah. I got a little more pigment. Anyways, good morning. Welcome to Twin Lakes Church. My name is Adrian. I'm one of the pastors here. Excited to share God's Word with you this morning. If you are here, welcome. Live in the auditorium, joining us in venue, Facebook Live, hello, or maybe even from the future on TLC.org or on our app or Access Cable. Welcome from the past.

Excited to continue our New Year's series. It's called Start. And been looking at wisdom from the book of Proverbs. Today, you can take out your message notes you got in. They're in your bulletin. You can take them out. Follow along. Some fill in the blanks if you like to listen that way. Today we're gonna look at how we can start thriving at work. Thriving at work. Why are we talking about work? Well, have you ever thought about the amount of time spent at work? Maybe some of you have thought this on your commute. Maybe like, how long am I gonna be here? Let's just look at it.

Let's take a look. The average cliché amount of time of work a day is eight hours, right? So let's take that eight hours depending on where you work. There's some commute involved. So anywhere between eight and twenty hours depending on what's going on on traffic, right? If there's a mudslide, you can get here tomorrow. But you go to work and you drive to work and you're at work for a long time. Now think about the times you're not at work. Maybe an hour or so before and maybe a few hours after you get home if you're really tired before you go to sleep. And if you're a parent, that's 24 hours a day. Well, you got to sleep. So 22 hours a day, you're working depending on the age of your child.

Somebody told me after, like, "Oh man, my kids are growing up. Now I can sleep through the night. You'll get there one day." And I'm like, "Okay, it doesn't help me right now. I'm sleeping and I'm tired." But we spend so much time. Most of our waking hours are spent at work. So we spend all this time there. How do you feel about work? That's a question we ask. You know, do you ever wonder if your work matters? Do you ever wonder if you're making a difference in the world or do you just feel like you, you know, you're going to work for a paycheck and one day you can just stop working? A lot of us look at our work that way.

The reason we have these questions and ask them to ourselves is because work is broken. Work is broken and the way we see work and the way we work is broken. And we see this played out in two really extreme ways. The first one is this. Idleness. You can fill this in. Idleness. Proverbs chapter 13 verse 4 says this, "The soul of the sluggard craves and gets nothing while the soul of the diligent is richly supplied." Sluggard. The writers of Proverbs love to bash and make fun of lazy people. And in this verse, use the word "slugger." And a lot of times, like, as you see, comparing the lazy or the sluggard to the diligent or hard worker.

But what is a sluggard? I mean, nobody uses that word today. I've seen a slug once in my life, a banana slug, and I was like, "Oh, that was the greatest day of my life." Wow, it didn't do anything. Maybe that's what it is. When I think of a lazy person or a sluggard the way Proverbs describes it, I think of a guy, because I'm picturing myself on a sofa laying there and I'm watching, you know, binge watching some Netflix show, like, Great Family Cook-Off. That was a really good show. We watched a lot of that show quickly. It's an eating show, it's a food show, so I gotta have some food because I'm gonna be hungry.

And so, not as much anymore, but my favorite to watch TV is a bag of Cheetos. And if I'm really hungry, Cheetos and cheese puffs to get both, you know, textures and consistency. So I have those too, the puffed and the crunch. So then I'm laying there, laying like this, my head drooling, watching this show. Orange dust is just all over this shirt of mine. You know, that orange paste is on my fingers. This is a Super Bowl. I'm like thinking about the snacks I want to eat. And then this lazy sluggard drops a Cheeto or whatever and I could get up and put my stuff down and go and reach it. But no, I'm gonna reach my leg over and try to grab it with my toe and like, "Huck it up to myself." Like praying. Like, "God, please let this one get in my mouth this time. Oh, it'll be awesome." That's what the lazy person looks like, a sluggard. Just, you can't, you know, do anything.

Well, how do we see this at work? It's when you go to work and all you do is you're trying not to work. We see this all over popular culture too. My favorite shows, comedy shows, are The Office and Parks and Rec. And in these two shows, full of people, who just, a lot of people hate their jobs and don't want to be there and trying to figure out ways not to work. So I thought, "How do we do that?" So I googled, "Slacking off at work." Lots of stuff there. And I found this article, "The 50 best ways to slack off at work." Now, this isn't the application portion of this message, so don't go back to your jobs like using these tools to slack off at work.

And if your boss asks you, "Where'd you learn these things?" Mark Spurlock was preaching at church that weekend. "The 50 best ways." Just a few that I found that I thought are effective. One is starting kitchen conversations or whatever that place in your workplace where people congregate, water cooler, Keurig, whatever, coffee maker. And then you get in a conversation or you start a conversation that you know people are really passionate about or the episode of whatever show last night you're like, "Oh!" And you start talking and talking and 30 minutes, 40 minutes goes by and all you've done is talked about whatever latest episode of Great Family Cook-Off, it was a really good show.

And your boss comes in, "What are you doing?" You're like, "We're just building teamwork and camaraderie here, okay?" Or if you've ever done this, number two, I saw arranging your desk so no one can see your screen so you can watch whatever, you know, something as you're working. I'm like, "I'm working as you're watching a show." Nobody's ever done that in this room. Of course not. My favorite, they're walking around the office with a sense of urgency. Have you ever done this or seen people do this? They have like a folder and they're going somewhere. We don't know where. There's like nowhere in your work to go but they're just walking around like this and I've done, you know, I've seen people like go to the copy machine like, "Oh, I was just pushing buttons," and they leave. They don't even grab any copies. They're just like faking it.

I like to implement this when you ask me to help you work. I just get a nondescript box and I just go in and out of rooms. He's like, "Man, he is working so hard. I just want pizza." Why do we do this? Why are we sluggers at work? Why are we lazy? Why do we slack off? Why do we try to get out of work? The reason is we don't value our work. We don't think the work that we do has any value or importance or is contributing anything to this world and so we just do the bare minimum to get by. And so broken work produces idleness and it also can produce idolatry.

Idolatry. I have this friend. He's working at a really big company over the hill. He's doing very well for himself. He's younger than me and we're having dinner one night. We're sitting there and we're just talking about work and stuff and he's like, "You know, I'm just blessed that if I didn't want to, I don't have to work anymore." I was like, "Oh, God bless you." And in my head I'm like, "What? You're 30 years old. I can't afford my rent here. You asked me to buy dinner? What is happening?" No. We always go Dutch. Anyways, he's doing very well and he loves his job. I would visit him at his work. He's like free food and all his great stuff, cool place. And he just, you know, his family was growing. He was married, his first daughter. Life was good.

One day we're together hanging out and he says, "Oh, I'm leaving this place and I'm going to this other very large company that I know very well." And, you know, it's like, okay, cool. And then he starts to tell me, "Go in there, but you know, the work environment I hear is not great and it's gonna add at least four hours to my daily commute." Four. And he said at least four. So maybe five, depending on traffic. So it begs the question, why are you leaving this job you love that you're doing fine at to go here? He told me two things. Number one, he said, "They offered me, they made me an offer I couldn't refuse." So a lot of money.

And then he said, "I am at this job right now and sometimes I think I was just lucky and a lot of, and I feel like people think that. I was just lucky to get into this company and be here for a long time and to be doing so well. I want to prove to myself that I am something, that I can go do something on my own, that I have some value. So I'm gonna go to this place that doesn't seem like a good idea." So he, you know, he goes and when we talk, it's at first it's great, you know. He's like in that honeymoon phase, like everything's cool and new. But very soon after that, he starts telling me his work environment's getting worse, his work hours are growing.

And then I said, and he would, every time we hung out, he would complain, like, which is fine. I'm like, I'm there for him, you know, he knows I'm a pastor and maybe he thinks like it's free counseling every time we hang out to go to the movies. I'm just like, "Okay, what's going on?" They tell me every time. And so finally, I'm like, "Why are you there? Why are you staying there?" And he's like, "If I don't work, then what am I? What value do I have if I'm not working? We need more, more security." And I'm like, "Didn't you tell me you don't have to work anymore?" Later on, another time we met, he told me, "I'm leaving." And I'm, and I didn't say this to him in my head. I'm like, "Thank God. This is free counseling. I'm gonna start charging you next night. We don't charge here. Anyways, but he's, can retire, so why not?"

And I'm like, "Okay, stop. He might watch this." He's joking, bud. He tells me he's leaving and I said, "Okay, why? Why are you leaving?" And he says, "Man, it's gotten really bad." His, I mean, the people at his work was really cutthroat, backstabbing, and he told me his family was breaking apart, falling apart. The relationship with his wife was strained. His, he was missing out on his daughter's life. His daughter, and he told me his daughter, his wife asked him the question, "How," he said, "How much are you willing to pay to watch your daughter grow up? The amount of money extra that you're making at this new company, that much at least?"

He said the final straw was when his second daughter was born and he, the day she was born, he held her in his arms. He thought about his life and he thought, "What am I doing?" And the next morning, he typed his resignation letter. Three weeks later, he left. Does that, does that sound, any parts of that story sound a little familiar? You're working more, you're doing, you're going to a job, maybe you shouldn't because some advancement or whatever reason you're going. Let's look at what Proverbs has to say about this. Proverbs 23 verse 4, "Don't wear yourself out trying to get rich. Be wise enough to know when to quit." The reason you fall into this trap, because it doesn't start off like, "I want to go take this job or work all these hours because I want to ruin my life." Nobody does that.

But what happens is you fall into the trap of idolatry and that happens when your job becomes everything to you. It's your, it's your ultimate source of acceptance. It's your ultimate source of security. You think, "If I just have some more money, I can be more secure." But you know what the secret is? There's never enough. You can, they've interviewed the richest people in the world literally and they all say, "I just need a little bit more." It's your source of value, your source of identity. Who am I if I'm not working? And then all of the things fall behind and come second, God, family, yourself, and that is idolatry. I love how Tim Keller puts it. He says, "It is anything more important to you than God. Anything that absorbs your heart and imagination more than God, anything, anything you seek to give you what only God can give." That's an idol.

Because we can get, we can think that idols are just these only little statues that you worship instead of God. But an idol is anything you put in front of God. And an idol is something that you try to get things from that only God can give you. And your work is never going to satisfy you in that way. You're never going to find all your value and meaning because work is broken. We see it in idleness and idolatry. So how can we fix it? How can we approach work in a healthy way, in a godly way? What we have to do is ask the question, we have to change the story. How do we fix work? We have to change the story because we all have a story we live by. It's the lens in which we see the world and how we approach the world, how we live in the world. You can call it your worldview.

And our current story tells us that jobs are a negative thing that we have to do. It's the reason that you just look forward to retirement one day because one day I work and I work so I can stop working. We look at this necessary evil, this necessary inconvenience. So when we work and when we think about our work and when we think about other people and their work, we look at it all through our current story, this broken story. So we have to ask the question, what is God's story? And it's in three parts. Number one, He created us to work. God created us to work. Think about, do you remember the creation story in Genesis chapter one? God created the heavens and the earth and He goes on in this beautiful chapter of the Bible. It describes Him just creating all these things and each day says, "This is good. All of this is good."

And in the midst of that good creation, He makes this beautiful and perfect paradise and He calls it the garden. And inside of this garden, He places and He creates people. And these people go in there and they have all their needs are met. Food is readily available. Their security and their identity, they have all those things fully because they are in perfect relationship with God, their Creator. And what does God do? What's the first thing He does when He, you know, He creates these people. Here's His perfect place. What's the first thing He does? He puts them to work. Genesis chapter two, verse 15, "The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and take care of it." Now when I say that and when I heard that the first time, I thought, "Man, God, just give him a break. Can't they just enjoy the garden for a little bit before He put him to work?"

But you know why we ask that question and why we think of it that way? Because we think work is bad. But what we're seeing here is work is good and He designed humans to work. Work was a part of us. You know, the Bible tells us that when God created humans, He made them, He made us in His image. And what that means is inside of us and our DNA are attributes of God. Now it doesn't make us gods, but we have things inside of us that God has. Our sense of justice and love, that comes from God. And our God is a working and creative God. When He made humans, He literally got His hands dirty, put His hands in the dirt and created. And He worked. And so we inherited that attribute. He designed us to work, but then something happened to that good work that came from God. Number two, sin broke work. Sin broke work.

Sin entered the world when Adam and Eve ate that fruit they weren't supposed to eat, and it affected everything. Humans now felt shame. They lost that relationship with God, so they lost their identity and their security and their belonging, and they lost the garden. The garden was gone. And so they lost that provision, that sustenance, and they lost that garden because the world broke. And that work, that good work, that broke. Right after Adam and Eve sinned, God sits down with them, or stands, or whatever He was doing, floats, and He talks to them. In Genesis chapter 3 at the end of verse 17, and He says, "Look what you did," basically, "the ground is cursed because of you. All your life you will struggle to scratch a living from it. It will grow thorns and thistles for you, though you will eat of its grains. By the sweat of your brow will you have food to eat." That good work broke, and now it's going to be hard. That sustenance that was just there for you, it's gone. You're going to have to make the—you're going to have to plant and grow those trees now. You have to work at it. You have to struggle and scratch a living. Sounds a lot like how we describe work sometimes. Scratch and claw to make a living.

So work is broken, but the good news, church, is that number three, Jesus redeems work. Jesus redeems it. The great truth—I mean, the answer to everything—is the gospel, and it affects all aspects of our lives. And the gospel is this. Jesus came to this earth, lived a perfect life, died on the cross, innocently for our sins, got rose him from the dead, raised him from the dead, and in that we have new life. We can place our faith in him. I grew up thinking, "Yeah, I believe that," and I thought that God basically did all those things, died on the cross, rose from the dead to buy me a ticket into heaven, is what I thought. I was like, "Oh, thanks God, I have it now, I can get into heaven, but now what do I do with my life? Who knows?" But I got this ticket, so when I die, I'm ready.

But the gospel isn't just your way into heaven, it affects every part of you. Not only your spirit and your soul, but your mind and your intellect and your bodies and this world and your work. In Revelation, Jesus says, "I am making all things new." I love how Tim Keller puts it. He says, "The gospel is the true story that God made a good world that was marred by sin and evil, but through Jesus Christ he redeemed it at infinite cost to himself, so that someday he will return to renew all creation. The vast implications of this gospel worldview affect everything and especially our work." And so now, through the lens of the gospel, seeing that he's redeeming all these things, that work is supposed to be a good thing, how do we approach work?

Paul tells us to approach work with this new worldview. 1 Corinthians chapter 10, verse 31, "So whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do it all for the glory of God." What Paul is telling us is now when we look at our work or anything we do, we look at it as a way to worship and glorify God, because God wants to be honored and glorified and worship through what you do and how you do it. So if work is broken and Jesus redeems it, what does that redeemed work look like? Because you might say, "Redeemed work, worshiping God with our work," well, sounds easy for you, pastor, or missionary, or, you know, maybe a doctor, you're carrying cancer, you're doing like, you know, honorable stuff, but what about me? I fill in the blank, and you think your work is not valuable. You think you're not doing anything of meaning.

The gospel tells us that all work is value. Number one, all work is value. Now, one caveat, or caveat, one thing, let's take out of the mix anything immoral or illegal, okay? I mean, all work is value, but, you know, there's some job, like, if your job is to hurt people or take advantage of people or offers no, offers nothing to anyone or to anything, that's not what we're talking about, okay? So if you're like a bank robber or a drug dealer, this doesn't apply. Quit. I'm talking about other things. You're helping, you're contributing. Dorothy Sayers, British author, writer, and writing during the time, you know, during World War II in England, she wrote a really good essay called "Why Work?" and it really impacted me, and, you know, sort of as I was getting ready for this really inspired me, and she touches on this.

She says this, "And nothing has a church so lost her hold on reality as in her failure to understand and respect the secular vocation or the non-church or non-religious jobs. She has allowed work and religion to become separate departments. We've come to believe that our work and our spiritual lives are two different things. We compartmentalize our lives, and God is in this part but not in this part. So from Monday to Friday, 9 to 5 is when I work, and then after that, then yeah, I can, you know, think about God and maybe worship God. And then because of that, we're tempted to think that some jobs are more important because they're more, you know, Christian than others. But that is not true. Your job has value. Your work has value. Why? Remember the garden, that perfect place, and people were inside of it. God created them, and they, all their needs were met. They had food to eat. The fruit was already on the trees and they could just pull it and eat it. They had acceptance. They had all these things. They had justice. You know, God took care of all that. Security.

And the Bible tells us that God is still sovereign. You know, sin broke all that stuff and took that all away, but God is still sovereign. He still sits on the throne, and He's still in charge, and He's still taking care of the world and us. And how do we see that? Is that He's still providing all those things for us. Tim Keller says it this way, "Work is a major instrument of God's providence. It is how He sustains the human world." How do we see that play out? You know, I was thinking about this, you know, when, at our house, we try to pray before every meal. Sometimes, like, just getting to the table to eat is like a struggle with these kids. But when we get there and we sit and we're like, "Okay, let's pray," and what we do when we pray is we pray, "God, thank You for this meal that You've blessed us with." Now, that You've provided.

And we made the food. We bought the, you know, we made the dinner. We bought the food from the store. But what we're doing is we're acknowledging through that prayer that those things are still provided by God because He's in charge. Later on in this service, we're going to receive our offering, and people who call to an extra church home are going to worship God through giving money. And what they're doing, what we're doing is that offering of money is an acknowledgment that everything in my life is a blessing from God and they're just giving part of it back as that acknowledgment. So with that in mind, when you're hungry, how does God provide? When you go to the grocery store and you walk, pick your grocery store, is there a funnel on top of this grocery store where God is raining down chickens and bananas and avocados and whatever, and is going through this funnel into an intricate series of tubes above the grocery store and plopping them down into baskets, into freezers, and onto shelves? No. That's not happening.

You know how God provides food? Farmers. Field workers breaking their backs every day to pick food. Truck drivers delivering that food. People unloading those trucks. People, you know, stocking those shelves. Butchers, you know, butchering the meat. People washing vegetables. People checking you out at the cash register. So the managers of these places. All those people involved in that industry are providing food and they are fulfilling God's sovereign plan to sustain the earth and humans. And it's not only food. In her book, "Kingdom Calling," Amy Sherman talks about this. She creates a helpful list. And I'm just going to read it so you get an idea of what we're talking about. How each of your jobs has value because you are doing something for God on this earth. Check this out. Redemptive work. God saving and reconciling actions. Pastors, ministers, counselors, therapists, psychiatrists.

Creative work. God's fashioning of the physical and human world. Entrepreneurs, actors, painters, musicians, producers, poets, dancers, all artists. Providential work. God's provision for sustaining humans and creation. Public workers, policymakers, shopkeepers, farmers, engineers, chefs, tailors, finance, electricians, carpenters, technology. Justice work. God's maintenance of justice. Judges, lawyers, paralegal, city managers, prison guards, peace officers, diplomats, supervisors. Compassionate work. God's involvement in comforting, healing, and guiding. Doctors, nurses, paramedics, physical therapists, psychologists, social workers, nonprofit directors, missionaries. And revelatory work. God's work to enlighten truth. Pastors. I put pastors in there twice. I don't know if you noticed that. It's just because I just want to feel better. Pastors, scientists, educators, journalists, scholars, writers.

And if you're a parent, you're doing all these things, right? You're feeding kids. If you have more than one kid, there's like justice and making sure like law and order happens in your home. And if you're retired, listen, retired church. I've heard from many retired people and I've seen, at least in my in-laws, working more than you have ever worked. What you do in your life is as important because you are doing those these things. You're fulfilling these things. Maybe you're not getting a paycheck for it. But you're working and you are fulfilling God's providential plan to sustain this earth and humans. Your work has value. So we see work through the gospel lens as having value. And second, the second thing we see, number two, is that Jesus' light shines.

So we see how the gospel changes the way we look at work. Now the gospel changes the way we work. The way we work. When your life is transformed by God, when you believe in Jesus' death and resurrection, the Holy Spirit comes inside of you and starts to transform you. And God is making us more kind and more loving. He tells us to be more compassionate and gracious and merciful, to have honesty and integrity. And so we live that way in all areas of our lives. We try to be Christ-like in every area of our lives, including work. Now that's the obvious logical thing, right? Just the way you act. But there is one more step to this and I think Proverbs shows us what that is. Proverbs 22-29. Do you see someone skilled in their work? They will serve before kings.

In Proverbs, most of the time when it's talking about work, it's comparing the lazy person and the diligent person or the hard worker. This is something different than the hard worker. This is a skilled worker. The skilled worker is someone who doesn't just work hard and doesn't just work diligently, but is someone who does their specific job, their specific work well and with excellence. And when you do your job well and with skill, kings take notice. Now, monarchies aren't like the most prevalent government system, you know, that we're used to. They still exist. But back in the day, a king in his castle, if you, you know, if you wanted his ceiling painted beautifully, he doesn't go outside of the castle and like nail, his castle is not made out of wood. He makes a person hold a classified ad outside and like come, you know, apply for a job.

No, you know what a king does? He hears that this person is the greatest artist of our time. This person is the greatest blacksmith. That is the greatest architect. And what the king says is, "Get me that person to paint my ceiling. I want that blacksmith to make my weapons and my armor. That architect needs to build my tower because they are the best at what they do." And if you and I are serving and worshiping the king, then we're going to do our work well. We're going to train. We're going to learn. We're going to hone our skills to be the best at whatever we're doing. Dorothy Sayers quotes another writer in her essay. She writes, "As Jack Martin says, if you want to produce Christian work, be a Christian and try to make a work of beauty into which you have put your heart. Do not adopt a Christian pose. Doing work for God isn't just looking the part. It is doing good work, skilled work."

What does that look like today? I heard this example. I think it works. What do Christian pilots, you know, how does that look for a pilot to be a Christian and work that way? First of all, they're kind and they're loving and they're patient and gracious with other people. You know, they're nice and they're Christ-like. And they get their passengers where they need to get promptly and safely. They land the plane, is what a Christian pilot does. They're not... A Christian pilot isn't a pilot who is up there and during the flight, you know, preaches the gospel over the loudspeaker. Let me be honest. I am... Not that I'm not being honest any other time. I don't know why I said that. Let me be transparent. I have anxiety when I fly a little bit. If there is turbulence, I put like indents into the, you know, armrests. The last thing I want to hear is a pilot preaching the gospel.

The last thing I want to hear is this. "Hello, folks. Your pilot up here are traveling 30,000 feet in the sky, clear skies, but just wanted to ask you a question. Do you know where you're going to go when you die? If not, I want to let you know Jesus died for your sins. He rose from the dead. You can believe today and be saved. Flight attendants will be coming down the aisles to pray the sinner's prayer with you. Thank you." I'd pass out. I think I would have a panic attack. This is like it sounds like our last rites, you know. Don't do that. A Christian pilot is a Christian, lands on the plane, gently. That's skill, right? What happens when you're a Christian and you do skilled work? It stands out. Matthew chapter 5 verse 16, Jesus says it this way, "In the same way, let your light shine before others so they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who was in heaven." When you change the way you work, people take notice.

People will see your integrity and honesty and love. They will see how well you do your jobs, and you know what's going to happen? Then they're going to ask you the question, "What is your secret?" That's your opportunity. That's your opportunity to say, "Well, Jesus changed my life, and when I work, I work as a way to worship God, to fulfill His purposes here on earth, and I think that's what I and what we're doing here at this company, and so I do my work as best as I can and is honest and with integrity." All work has value. His light will shine. You'll stand out. And finally, the third thing we see is a true rest is experienced. Our current story, this broken work, we experience restlessness.

No amount of time off or vacation time alleviates the restlessness we have. And the restlessness inside of us, there's a voice inside of us telling us, "You're not doing enough. Work more and more and do more." Because what we're trying to accomplish in our work, in this broken worldview, is we're trying to get things that it can't offer. Acceptance, identity, and value and worth, those things God has to offer. So we fall into the trap of idolizing our work, and so when that happens, we overwork ourselves. We take ourselves away from our families more than necessary. We take jobs we shouldn't take, and we do things in our jobs we shouldn't do. Because we're just trying to get something. We're trying to get those things.

But when we see our work through the gospel, we can rest from the pressure, from that internal constant voice pressuring us to do more, more, more to get that stuff. Hebrews chapter 4 verses 9 through 10 says, "So there is a special rest, still waiting for the people of God, for all who have entered into God's rest have rested from their labors, just as God did after creating the world." What that is saying is you can rest. All those things that you want, all that acceptance, and all that stuff that God has to offer you, sin is keeping us away from it. But what this is saying is that God did the work for us. Jesus Christ came to this earth, like I said, lived perfectly sinless, and died on the cross bearing all of our sins. He rose from the dead, and in that finished work, God accepts us and values us, and we have identity.

We find our value, I mean. We have acceptance, all that. All that stuff that sin took away, we can now have through Jesus Christ, through His finished work. Because this is the bottom line. The gospel changes everything. It changes everything, not just your spirit and your soul, but your mind and your intellect, everything, your work, this world. And this is why your work, no matter how mundane or how invaluable or non-contributing you think it is, this is why it matters. Because you belong to Jesus, and your work matters to Him. And if it matters to Him, that changes everything. Another day's work doesn't just become another day's work. It's more than that. I'll leave you with this last verse, Colossians chapter 3 verse 17. "Whatever you do, whether in word or deed, do it all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through Him." Let's pray.

Oh, Father, we thank You so much for Your love and Your grace and God, Your gospel, the gospel changes everything. And I thank You that Your gospel of grace, that, God, we don't have to do anything to earn Your love, but, God, You loved us so much that You sent Jesus to die for our sins. You resurrected Him from the dead. We thank You, Lord, that that, the power that raised Him from the dead can live in us, those of us who believe, transforming us and transforming the way we look at this world and approach this world, our work and the way we work. And I thank You for that. Help us, Lord, to do whatever we're doing as if we're doing it for You in worship to You.

And, God, I pray for those in this room who might not have made that decision today, haven't yet taken that step to place their faith in You. God, I pray that You move in their hearts this morning. If you're here today, sitting in this room, and you've never placed your faith in Jesus, and today you're hearing the gospel, and it's resonating with You, and you're ready, you can do it right from your seat. You just pray a prayer that says, "God, I believe. I believe that Jesus is the Son of God, that He died for my sins. He rose from the dead. The Bible says if you believe in that, and you pray that, you pray that, you will be saved. And that's it. It's a free gift. God, thank You for Your love and Your grace. In Jesus' name, amen.