Mark 1:4-15
Listening guide
What’s your least favorite job? ________________
What’s your most favorite job? _________________
Work is ___________________, challenging toil.
Work is _____________________.
Work is ______________________.
Everyone __________________ even if work is ______________.
We fix work the _________ ____________.
Hear God’s __________ and get to __________!
God’s call gives you weight or substance or strength so that work doesn’t destroy you.
God’s call gives you a sense of the dignity and the worth of even simple work without which you could be bored to death.
God’s call gives you a moral or ethical compass without which work will corrupt you.
God’s call will shape your work.
Sermon
Sad to not be physically with you today.
Thankful to Tom Wright, Cindy, Kaitlyn, Charlie, and Hannah, and especially Tom for covering for me last week. Thank you
Thank you to Hannah, Cindy, Kaitlyn and especially Josh and Ron for covering for me today. Thanks for your work guys. So good to work with you to bring you and the people you love the gospel of Jesus.
I wanted to be with you. Wanted to preach. I was telling my wife as I went to bed how weird it was, no matter how I was feeling I still want to be in church. Nothing like the physical gathering of God’s people to celebrate. I have that pleasure and delight, that passion for work.
To get started today, what about you and your work?
What has been your least favorite job or work? __________________
What has been your favorite job or work? _________________
I thought about this last week. We were visiting my parents this last week. It snowed Tuesday into Wednesday. My son told his grandpa before bed, grandpa will you please wake me up at 4:30 tomorrow so that we can go shovel? I said things like Josiah that is too early. You need to sleep. Mom said the same.
He got up the next morning about 5:30 and got right outside with grandpa to help shovel. Grandpa was saying later I don’t know if I’ve ever seen someone so excited to shovel snow! Friday afternoon it snowed again. My son came to me and said, Grandpa said he would wake me up at 4:30 again tomorrow. I knew exactly what he meant. What excitement!
Is that how you feel about your work?
A couple of weeks ago I was at study with someone.
One of my favorite examples of loving our work comes from Chariots of Fire. Eric Liddell “when I run I feel God’s pleasure”
Adventure/Discover
That’s what I want us to have today. I want us to have pleasure in work no matter what the work.
That’s what I want us to get throughout this season of the year. Between Christmas and Easter, we see Jesus at work.
That all starts today with this event we call the baptism of Jesus. The Bible is a little strange in telling us the story of Jesus. We hear his birth and then jump right ahead to his public work. This means so much to him. Why do I say that? After Jesus is baptized, he is driven at once by the Spirit to be tempted. What happens at his baptism because this catalyst to drive him forward into one of the worst experiences of anyone’s life.
God says, you can have the same pleasure, the same passion for work – no matter what your work is.
Development
This is the beginning of Jesus’ public ministry. It’s the beginning of his work. Immediately after this there will be a couple of events that confirm Jesus’ work.
He will be tempted. We might imagine it something like getting tested on the job. Does he have the skills? Does he have the ability to do the job?
He will call his first disciples. 4 guys, his first followers. They confirm, yes he really is a public teacher. So this is the beginning of his work.
He does a different work than we do. He comes in a long line of Jewish religious teachers and priests. He follows after people like Moses, Isaiah, and Jeremiah. Now, I know that this kind of preaching, teaching, and training doesn’t seem much like work. But did you see, he experiences many of the same frustrations a farmer, a truck driver, or a mechanic experience.
Temptation - Work is frustrating, challenging toil. - “through painful toil you will eat food” (Gen 3:17)
“it will produce thorns and thistles for you” (Gen 3:18) Work is fruitless. It produces what we don’t want instead of what is good, natural, and what we do want.
“you return to the ground” (Gen 3:19) Work can become pointless.
These are the three main challenges to our work, and still, Jesus works. I want us all to notice this. Jesus works. Everyone thinks Jesus is great.
That doesn’t mean he gets out of work. He works just like you and me.
Jesus never worships work. That was the mistake of the Protestant work ethic in America. President Coolidge wrote, “The man who builds a factor builds a temple. The man who works there worships there.” Henry Ford said, “Work is the salvation of the human race.” (Os Guiness, The Call, 40)
That’s how we mess up work. That’s not Jesus. But neither does Jesus avoid work. Jesus works because that is what people do. “The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it.” (Gen 2:15) Jesus worked because people work. As soon as God put people in this world he gave them work.
No matter how bad it is. No matter how hard it is.
Everyone works even if work is bad.
So how do we fix work?
I know work is hard. I feel it to. We get nothing done. We’re frustrated. We’re annoyed. We watch the rich get richer, we feel. We see nothing for years of labor.
I hear you. And most of the time when people want to quit, we say something like, what do you want to be known for? What do you want to leave behind?
That doesn’t help. We already feel like we aren’t doing anything.
And when we’re really tired and frustrated, someone always seems to say. Push on. Just keep going. It’ll get better.
We even might say something like, let’s get to the Lord’s work. We’ve got a lot of work to do here at church. Maybe you’re happy with the rest of life or not, let’s get to work over here.
Dorothy Sayers “The church’s approach to an intelligent carpenter is usually confined to exhorting him to not be drunk and disorderly in his leisure hours and to come to church on Sundays. What the church should be telling him is this: that the very first demand that his religion makes upon him is that he should make good tables.” (Dorothy Sayers
We fix work the wrong ways.
What does Jesus hear then that changes his work?
God won’t change all of the work in the world, but he will change right now who you are in the world. That’s exactly what he does with Jesus. He tells Jesus, “You are my Son”. “you are my Son, whom I love.” (verse 11)
God places this call, this claim, this expectation, and this declaration on Jesus himself.
These words, “You are my Son, whom I love.” God placed a claim on Jesus’ life. He affirmed who he was. He asked him to be someone in particular.
We have to realize just how much this is not good advice or good information, but this is truly good news.
If you’ve ever started a job before, what does both the interview and day 1 almost inevitably start with? The interview is mostly going to start with a job description and matching up your education, your experience to the job. Do you have the abilities, do you have the skills for the job? When you get to day 1 on the job, day 1 is almost inevitably going to run over all the expectations you have to fulfill to keep the job. Show up on time, report to this person, send in this many reports per week, complete these tasks, and so on. None of that is bad. That’s all good information. That’s all good information you need to do your job.
Without that information you would almost certainly fail at your job. Have you ever tried to do a job where you didn’t know the expectations of the boss? There is no more frustrating and failure filled experience. But all that information, as good as it is, isn’t good news.
They are still demands you have to live up to.
The other part that is always fun when you start a new job, one of the first few days on the job somebody will pull you aside and say, here are all the things
That’s good advice.
None of that is good news. None of that is what God said to Jesus. You are my Son. That claim, that affirmation is powerful good news.
I think about this when I see kids with special toys. For me, it was my dut. I got this duck before I was one. I loved it so much, I wore it apart. Funny part was, when I was two I think, I got a new duck. That duck is pristine to this day.
I said, “you are my dut”. I did not want any other duck. And no other duck could do the job of dut. Dut was the one and only. He was the only one who could be dut for me.
You see, my claim, my affirmation on dut made him dut. I refused to ask any other duck to be my duck, so no one else could do the job. You know there was nothing wrong with the duck itself. It’s a perfectly fine duck. Instead, it was entirely my claim on that duck that made it my duck.
We say, wait a second. Does this thing happen with God? Does God place a call or a claim or an expectation or a declaration, whatever you want to call it, on a person, that profoundly influences who they are? I say yes.
I don’t know if you know the story of Aleksander Solzenitsyn. He was a famous writer who died about 10 years ago. He became one of the most famous critics of Communism through his writing.
But he didn’t start out that way. He actually said that he “drifted in literature unthinkingly and hate to think what sort of writer I would have become.”
But his time in the Gulag (the Soviet camps), a miraculous cure from cancer, his conversion to faith in Jesus, and a deepening burden to put the “dying wish of the millions” on record opened his eyes to an immense calling he had.
At 55, still with 20 years of life and work left, he said, “The one worrying thing was that I might not be given time to carry out the whole scheme. I felt as though I was about to fill a space in the world that was meant for me.”
Substitution = Jesus in my place
Jesus took your place in his baptism. Jesus wants to take your place. Won’t you let him? Won’t you let him be that Son
Alex hates baths. Every time I bathe him, I think, I would glad to take your place.
Hear God’s call and get to work
I want to wrap this up and quickly give you 4 ways that hearing God’s call will make a clear difference for work. These are really encouraging.
God’s call gives you the weight or substance or the strength so that work doesn’t destroy you.
God’s call gives you a sense of the dignity and the worth of even simple work without which work could bore you to death.
God’s call gives you a moral or ethical compass without which work will corrupt you.
God’s call will shape your work.
Take these 4 ways God’s call matters for work and hear God’s call. Jesus went first to make the space for you. He is the Son you and I never are so that we can truly be sons and daughters of God.
Hear God’s call and get to work.