Our gospel lesson this morning is taken from 1st Sessalonians. I invite you to turn there in your Bibles and if you're using the Bibles that are in your seats, that's found on page 168. And we'll take a look this morning at a number of passages. We'll begin with chapter 1, verse 3, 1st Sessalonians chapter 1, and verse 3. This is God's Word, eternally true. We continually remember before our God and Father your work produced by faith, your labor prompted by love, and your endurance inspired by hope in our Lord Jesus Christ. Now please skip down to chapter 2 and verse 9. Surely you remember brothers, our toil and hardship. We work day and night in order not to be a burden to anyone while we preach the gospel of God to you. Now please skip down to chapter 4, verse 11. Make it your ambition to lead a quiet life, to mind your own business, and to work with your hands just as we told you, so that your daily life may win the respect of outsiders and so that you will not be dependent on anybody. And then lastly, to chapter 5, verse 14. And we urge your brothers, warn those who are idle, encourage the timid, help the weak, be patient with everyone. Here ends our reading, the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God indeed, let's pray. For God and our Father, we are thankful that you love us enough to give us your word, to direct us, to guide us, to teach us about yourself, and to teach us how we might fulfill our purpose of showing what you're like in the world, by what we say, and by the things we do. So we thank you for this, your word, which shows us these things. We thank you for this, your word, which shows us your grace and mercy to us in your gospel. Preach to us now, Jesus, we pray, through this, your word, and by your spirit, make it effective in our hearts. Calls us to hear it, and to repent, calls us to be receiving of it, so that it has the effect that you said it should have, that it teaches us, that it rebukes us, that corrects us, and that it trains us in righteousness. Do these things through this, your word, by the work of your spirit and word, now we pray Jesus in your name. Paul has been talking about a number of things that are activities of our lives, and how these things relate to love the past couple of weeks. We've talked about how tasks, truth, and love are all interrelated, and this week we get a theme throughout for Sessonians, you see here, of work. How does our work, how does what we do fit into the scheme of things? Does God care about your work, whatever that may be? Is work valuable? Why do we work? Does work not matter in light of spiritual realities, or is work something for us, to which we need to pay attention? And God gives us answers to that, Paul gives answers to that, to the Sessonians. The Sessonians were a little bit too second coming minded, and so in both first and second Sessonians that's a big topic that Paul addresses with this congregation. They were looking at what Jesus said, and what Paul had taught according to what Jesus said, that Jesus' return, his second coming, could be at any time. He told people in the first century Jesus did, Paul did, the apostles did, that they should be living in such a way that as if they are watching and waiting for Jesus' return because it could have come in the first century. This is what we see in Scripture, it's what we see from the lips of Jesus, it's what we see from the teaching of Paul and Peter and out of Luke's material. So the Sessonians saw that, that Jesus was really free to come back at any time, there were no events that were intervening that needed to happen, so they were to watch and to wait to be ready for his coming. So what did that mean for his work? And some people in the Thessalonians church had quit working, they said, well, works have no value, only the spiritual things are of value. And if Jesus is coming back anyway and he's going to said all wrongs right, that kind of thing, why spend any time or effort or energy working? And so this is what college dresses in these verses through Thessalonians that we read this morning. The first thing we should do is review what the question is that we're talking about and it's this. And if you'd like to fill out blanks in an outline, you're free to do that. Or you can just sit there and listen, that's okay too, whichever way you take it in better. But what we're talking about here is how you should think about work. That's your first line there if you're following the outline. How you should think about work. Is it valuable? Does God care about it? All that kind of stuff. Why do we do it? How you should think about work. And so first, Roman number one, we are defining an understanding work. How do we define work? Does the Bible say anything about it? Well, yes it does. The Bible says plenty about work and we've looked at a number of those passages as Larry read them to us and as we saw here in First Sessonians defining an understanding work. First of all, we say that A, work can mean many things. Work can be many things. Work can be your vocation, your job. If you're in a job and you're getting paid for doing that work, that's certainly your work. But it's not limited to that. Many of you have work that you do as a father. Some of you have work that you do as a mother and that's a life vocation that you have. You don't get paid for it. That'd be nice if you did. You have work that you do as a husband. You have work that you do as a wife. As kids, you have work that you do around the house. If you're a mom, you have work that you do with your kids. Whatever that is, just like a father has work that he does with his kids. You can have work that you do that's yard work. You work that you do that is neighborly kind of work. What you're doing in your neighborhood, things that you're doing, activities that you're doing that can be defined here as work that are encompassed in the biblical idea of work, your labor, your activity. And of course, serving in the church, that's work as well. We labor in the church in various ways using the gift God has given us for the building up of his people. So work can be many things. Second thing, or B, in its essence and biblically, work is you ruling and subduing. Work is you ruling and subduing the stuff of this earth. And we see this in Genesis. God creates the stuff of this earth, the dirt, the trees, the animals, all this stuff. And then he turns the atom and says, rule over this stuff. Stand in my place as ruler in residence and rule over this stuff. And subdue this stuff. Doesn't mean be mean to it or abuse it when he says subdue, but it means take management over it. Rule over it, direct it so that, well, we'll get to the so that in a minute. So work is you ruling and subduing the stuff on this earth. So whatever your vocation is, and all of us have many vocations, the vocation, if we're working and getting paid, that's our vocation. We do that. We do our jobs in our family. We do our jobs in our neighborhood. We do our jobs in the church. All that work is biblically speaking, ruling and subduing the earth. So work is not a third thing about work as we define it. Work is not part of the curse. That's an important thing for us to realize. Work is not a part of the curse. And you heard Larry earlier read to us first of all from Genesis 1, it says, rule over the earth. And that's work. But then two, Genesis 2, God says to Adam in the garden, pre-fall. I put you in the garden to work it. So Adam is doing work in the garden, and presumably Eve as well. But they're doing work in the garden, pre-fall. So work is not a thing of the curse. We're not working as penalty. Work is something that's good, that God created us for. And there's a very good argument to say that that's part of the image of God, which resides on us. God creates us in his image, we bear his image, and part of it is like Jesus said when he healed on the Sabbath, he said, God the Father is always working, and I am always working. So God is a worker. He works and he creates on the six days of creation. He works even on this day to sustain us each week. And so work is a good thing that he's created for us, and it's probably part of the image of God on us. So we want to get ourselves in that mindset, that our work is part of who we were created to be, to do work. Now number two, so we've defined work, it can be many things, it's all the stuff that you do. Work, biblically speaking, is ruling and subduing the stuff around you. We'll talk about why we're doing this in a bit, and then work is not part of the curse. But work is something that God designed for us to do, pre-fall, pre-set. Number two, God tells us, and in this passage, another passage is this. Work hard, work hard, why in order to produce a product or service that benefits others. Work hard to produce a product or service that benefits others. This is why we work to benefit others. And this is where that work, love, and truth thing comes all together. Why do we work to benefit others, to love others? So we work hard in order to produce a service or product that benefits others. Whether those people be your church, we work hard to benefit our church. We work hard to benefit our families. We work hard to benefit our neighbors. We work hard to benefit our boss, our company, whatever our situation is. Whatever our work is, we're working hard to benefit other people. So we stayed here plainly in A, your work, your product or service is part of you loving your neighbor. It's a means of you loving your neighbor. It's one way you can love your neighbor by your work, through your work, so that you are good for something, for somebody else. So we see this in chapter 1, verse 3 of Thessalonians. If you look there in chapter 1, verse 3, we continually remember before God and Father, your work produced by faith, your labor prompted by love. Because of your faith, because you believe this is true, because you believe God's image is upon you, and you are to benefit others, that you're to love your neighbor as yourself. It's all part of your faith. You've done this work. Because you love people, you labor, Paul says. Our labor is to be prompted by love. Your work, your product or service is part of you loving your neighbor. So in your vocation and your job, you all have a product or service that you're providing. If I'm a chemist and I work for a pharmaceutical company, I am laboring, I am doing work, and here's what I'm doing. I'm taking the stuff of this earth and subduing it. Taking the chemicals that God has created and managing them. I'm putting them together in such a way that it helps people with cancer or with their common cold or with their acid reflux or whatever it is. If I'm a pharmacist, so you're working, subduing the stuff of the earth for the benefit of people. If I'm a pharmacist, subduing all these medicines that are out there in the world, bringing them to one place in an order so that when somebody has a medical need, perhaps even a medical emergency, it's there readily available so that they can live or be helped or brought back to health. If you're a teacher, you're taking the facts of this world and you're subduing them. You're ordering them into a lesson plan, putting it together and putting it out there for the benefit of your students so they can live successfully in life. If you're a mom, what you're doing is you're taking all the chaos which can be a household, the stuff of the house, the management of the house, getting people to appointments and making lunches and all kinds of things like that. If you're subduing all this chaos into order for the sake of your kids, everything we're doing, when we're mowing our yard, we're subduing the earth for the sake of our neighbors and our family so they can play on the yard so our neighbors can sell their house for a higher price. I'm done with mowing, and someone else is going to do that for me, but we work, all our work, everything you're doing, God says to you, everything you're doing, you're doing for the benefit of another, and thinks through that in your life and that will give you the things that you're doing great meaning. We're subduing this and that and the other, the cars we drive, we're subduing time and travel, aren't we? We're getting from one place to another by pressing that accelerator and driving along, the roads that we have is subduing the earth so we can travel from one place to another more efficiently. Everybody has work like that that is subduing the earth so that we can benefit other people. Car makers are doing that so our lives can be more convenient. All our work is to be under that. So, you see, work is not for, this is B here, work is not for yourself. God doesn't create work for you. Now, it's satisfying to do work because we were created to have dominion, we were created to subdued things, and so when we do work, it's satisfying to us in an inward, soul kind of way. When we finish a project and we look at it, we say, yes, that's done. I did that and that satisfies us because God created us to do that. I was really impressed, I was at a funeral recently and the son of the man who had died spoke and he said, his dad's last day at work, he had done all this work, he had really worked hard, he was over at the coast and he was digging like trenches and that kind of thing. And he got to the end of his day and he said, now that was a good day, I got a lot done. That's the image of God. He accomplished something for the person who hired him to do it and it was for the good of other people. And he had satisfaction in that and that's God's encouragement to you, have satisfaction in your work, whatever it's doing, if you're a postman or a postwoman and you take that mail around, you're doing things for the benefit of other people. That's a divine calling upon you and upon your life. But notice that work is not for yourself, it's for benefiting other people, it's to love other people, it's to make their lives better, their lives easier. That is, it's not for yourself to gain money or things or prestige for yourself. Now you work to make money but you make money for other people, you make money for your spouse, you make money for your kids, you make money so you can support your aging parents, you make money so that you can give to people who are in need. And this is the biblical view of money, we use money to make friends, we use money to do good things, we don't use people to make money. So, see, related to that, work that is to your neighbor's detriment is work to quit, time to find a new job. Okay, so you can make money by building and running a strip club but that's to your neighbor's detriment, that's to your worker's detriment, that's to the detriment of all the marriages of anyone who's involved in that and God says quit that work because that work is out of the back. Work is out of the bounds of work's definition, work is to be for the benefit of other people and so we do work to benefit other people not to do something that is to our neighbor's detriment and so if we're doing something to our neighbor's detriment that is work to quit. Jesus comes to this earth and his love for us is worked out in his work. We talk about in the church for centuries the person and work of Jesus, what is Jesus' work? Jesus' work was being incarnated coming from heaven to earth, living in the womb of a woman for nine months, being born, growing up, living righteously, obeying God in all ways, loving his neighbor perfectly. And then going to the cross, bearing our sins in his body and dying for us so that the penalty do us would be spilled out upon him, that was his work and he does that work, notice that's not for the detriment of us, that's for our benefit. That's the pinnacle of work, that's what we're to think about in these micro kind of ways in our own lives, how can my work be for the benefit of others as Jesus' work here on earth was for the benefit of me?
So we work hard in order to produce a product of service that benefits others, we work hard in order to love other people, to care for them, to make their lives easier, to make their lives better, and then number three, work hard in order to gain a hearing for the gospel. And we see this in chapter 4, verse 12, Paul says, make your ambition to work with your hands so that verse 12 says your daily life may win the respect of outsiders so that you'll not be dependent upon anybody. So we work hard so that others aren't burned with us for sure, we work hard for that reason, but we work hard so that we might gain a hearing for the gospel. Here's what this means, don't be an irresponsible employee, don't be an employee who shows up late, don't be an employee when your boss asks you to do something that you grumble or that you don't do it or that you hesitate to do it. Or that you argue with him when he tells you to do something, work hard, do what he wants you to do. He's your authority, God has sovereignly put him there. So don't be an irresponsible employee, don't be lazy, don't be undependable. Easily comply to your boss's orders unless you stall you to curse Jesus or something like that, be on time, etc. Why? Well, one, you want to be a blessing to the people around you, you want to produce a product or service that is the other's blessing. So you readily take on work to do that, but two, you want to have your life be such that when you speak of Jesus or when you invite your co-workers or your boss to church, they have reason to say, well, maybe. Think about the opposite. You know, if you, you know, many of you are bosses yourselves and you know what it's like when you have an employee that's always complaining, it's always doing a shoddy job at things, it doesn't do things completely, it's trying to hand off his work to somebody else that shows up late and all that kind of thing. What if that person to you turned and you weren't a believer and said, hey, you should believe in you, you should come to my church. You would rightly say, well, if you're what a Christian is, no, thank you. And thank you for warning me, I will not hire Christians in the future. My dad used to look in the shepherd pages, you know, the Christian yellow pages and not hire those people because they did shoddy work. And he was so disappointed and distraught over that. He came to be a believer at the age of 45 and his dad was a believer all his life and had worked hard and instilled these principles of working hard for the sake of other people. My dad wasn't a believer but his father, my grandfather, had instilled that in him. And so he couldn't conceive of the fact that you could be a believer and not work hard and not do a good job with what you're doing and not make sure that that job is okay and that the people are satisfied with it. He couldn't believe that and he was so disappointed time after time after time when he would have someone with the Jesus fish on their ad in the yellow pages, come and do a shoddy job for him. And he got to the place where I am, no, I want someone who's competent. And I hope I find out that that competent person is a Christian and is doing his work heartily as for the Lord rather than for men. Colossians 3, 23. So we work hard in order to gain a hearing for the gospel. And that's important for us. We don't just go into work. We're not just an in parents hear this. We work hard at parenting because we want our kids to give the gospel a hearing. Okay, we hear that. We don't want our kids to say, well, my mom or dad's a lousy parent, but they're always talking about Jesus. And then that makes them question. We want to work hardily as for the Lord and whatever it is we're doing so that what we say about Jesus or invitations to the church are commended by the kind of work that we've done. Okay, so we want to gain a hearing for the gospel. And so that is a significant reason going on down in your outline a significant reason not the only reason for Jesus hard work and healing and overcoming nature and casting out demons, which he does in the gospels throughout and we're told in the gospels that sometimes that's to the point of exhaustion. Jesus is doing that and he's exhausted and he goes and he hides and goes away and he gets in a quiet place and he prays and he gets rejuvenated because he's expended himself to the maximum of his human ability and his human body there and he's emotionally he's physically exhausted. He works in that way for the people around them because he loves these people who bear his image he does this this hard work and we we're told in the gospels that part of that at least part that's kind of being mild. It's almost primarily it's not completely but at least in part he does this to gain a hearing for the gospel to gain a hearing for the gospel. And we see this in John 626 through 40 we see this in Mark 32 through 39 there in Mark 1 Jesus has healed all these people and cast out demons and that kind of thing and the people are surrounding and all that kind of thing and he says let's go to another place now too and preach the gospel for that's why I've come. Jesus uses his miracle doing to gain a hearing for the gospel he makes bread in the crowd that's what John 6 is about and the crowd comes to him and Jesus nails him on it he says you've come to me because you've seen me do great things great signs you've seen me make bread from a few loaves and a few fish. But here's the bread you need and he teaches them the gospel eat of me and drink of me and you'll have life forever. And so we want our lives to be like Jesus that our hard work might serve the purpose of somebody giving an ear to the gospel because as Paul says here that we have won the respect of outsiders by our working. Okay, so summary for us this morning summary a know that your work is valuable. If you're doing computer engineering or if you're doing computer programming whatever it is you're doing is valuable you're providing a service for other people you're protecting their stuff you're making their jobs more efficient so they can serve other people better. Your work is valuable your arrangement your managing your sub doing the stuff of this earth whether those be facts or or earth and plants or whatever it is that is valuable stuff and you're doing it's valuable because it's a means of loving people who bear God's image and God delights in that second thing summary. Do your work heartily in order to maximally love your neighbor why do you work hard because the harder you work the more you're loving your neighbor. Now some qualification with this so some qualification with this working hard working heartily working hard maximally does not mean you ignore your family. Because you don't know if your vocation is the job God wants you in right now there's nowhere in the Bible that you can point to that says so and so insert your own name should be working for this company. Nowhere in the Bible you can find that but God opens the womb and so you know from God that those kids are your responsibility and they need you. You know from the fact that you said I do to your spouse that God has joined you together and so you have a responsibility to your spouse and so working hard does not mean being a workaholic if you're a workaholic you're probably not loving your spouse and your kids like you should be loving them. You need to do your work for them well also let's pray. Father we thank you that you have placed upon us your image and that you have called us to exercise dominion over the earth for the sake of others for the benefit of other people. I pray Lord that you would encourage all here with the significance of their work whether that be in the home or outside the home that you are using them to subdue the chaos of this earth the weeds and the fistles so to speak by the sweat of their brow in order to do something wonderful and loving that treats your image on other people with great respect and care. So cause us to work hardily not just as it's for our particular human boss but as if it were for you yourself. Cause us to do that that we might be like you Jesus working hard for the sake of us in living righteously and dying the death we deserved. Cause us to work hard like you out of love for others and as we do that Lord build around us a respect that might commend the gospel that might commend you to them we pray Jesus in your name Amen.