God, The Center Of Your Vocation - Part 2 of 2

Let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith. Sometimes athletes run races in a lot of pain.

They keep going knowing the race will soon be over. We who are trapped in jobs we don't like can know that one day we'll meet our real boss, Jesus. He's the one we're really working for. Today, final thoughts on you and your vocation. From the Moody Church in Chicago, this is Running to Win with Dr. Erwin Lutzer, whose clear teaching helps us make it across the finish line. Pastor Lutzer, it seems the real issue is accountability. If I know that I'm accountable to God, I must be accountable to those in authority over me. Dave, I agree with that, but of course we do have to make an exception, and that is when those who are above us, to whom we are accountable, ask us to violate our consciences. The Bible is so clear that there comes a time when we might have to leave a vocation, we might have to disobey the government in order to be faithful to God.

If we say that we should always obey the government, for example, we are putting the government in the place of God. I want to thank the many of you who support the ministry of Running to Win. Would you consider becoming an endurance partner? That's someone who stands with us regularly with their prayers and their gifts. Well, of course, you need some info, so here's what you can do. Go to RTWOffer.com.

That's RTWOffer.com, and when you're there, you click on the endurance partner button, or you can call us at 1-888-218-9337. Commitment to God comes first, but also commitment to a job that we do well for Him. Christianity does not offer an escape from circumstances, but Paul would say that the power of the Gospel offers an opportunity to master those circumstances and to use even those circumstances for Christ. You conquer those circumstances, and so you serve wholeheartedly. You say, I can't do that.

Wait a moment. Have you ever asked Christ for the power and the ability and the strength and the yieldedness to serve wholeheartedly in a vocation for which you are not naturally gifted with people who are not naturally on your side in the disputes in the office? Have you ever prayed for your colleagues and said, God, you have planted me here, and I represent you here.

I don't like it, but Lord, teach me to be wholehearted right here. So Paul says, first of all, you should serve with an attitude of obedience, an attitude of wholeheartedness, but also serve with anticipation. You say, well, it doesn't make sense to serve that way.

Oh, yes, it does. Look at what the next verse says. Serve wholeheartedly as if you were serving the Lord, not men.

Now notice. Because you know that the Lord will reward everyone for whatever good he does, whether he is slave or free. Whatever good he does, whether he's a slave or whether he's a master, whether he's a free man of whatever kind, the Lord will reward any good you do. In other words, there's an eternity out there. And if you believe in eternity, you'll know that you don't have to win in this world in order to triumph in the next.

You really don't. Because what you can do is you can look forward to the time when the Lord is the one who finally writes the bottom line. Do you have enough faith to believe that you'll be rewarded for the good that you do even though you're serving someone who is not particularly nice? You say, well, we should serve the Lord because we love him, not because of rewards. What about Abraham? Abraham served because he looked for a city which have foundations whose builder and maker is God. What about Moses? Moses left the treasures of Egypt and he left the pleasures of sin.

Why? Because he knew that there was the recompense of the reward and that kept him going. I like what Jonathan Edwards says. He says, I am resolved to endeavor to obtain for myself as much happiness in the other world as I possibly can with all of the power, might, vigor, vehemence. Yea, violence I am capable of or can bring myself to exist in any way that I can be thought of, that I can think of rather. In other words what he's saying is, I am going to do all that I possibly can to be rewarded by Christ and in so doing I'll put up with a lot of flack here on earth because it is from the Lord that I'll receive my inheritance. Any one of us would put up with a real mean slave owner. We could endure it if we knew that within six months time we were going to inherit all of the possible freedoms and the blessings and the wealth imaginable.

Now you just simply take that and expand that. You can put up with a lot here in the workforce in the United States of America. You can put up with a lot because you know that this is not the final ledger. You are serving Christ and you do believe that you're going to be rewarded and the man who is misusing you, he is going to be judged by God.

Now of course if he's misusing you in terms of sexual harassment or whatever, let me be the first to say of course you should use those natural channels of complaint because you do belong to Christ and there are limits of course. But the fact is that at the end of the day you know that the final chapter has not been written and if a man is not a believer he also is going to stand before God at a different judgment other than the judgment seat of Jesus Christ and every single court case is going to be retried. Every judgment that has been made on earth is going to be reinvestigated and throughout all of eternity we are going to sing just and true are thy ways thou king of saints. Do you and I have enough faith to trust God for the eternal reward?

Let me help us as we bring this down to where all of us live. First of all let me say that every single mundane act done for Christ has eternal significance. Every mundane act done for Christ has eternal significance. Even a cup of cold water given in my name, you'll not lose a reward. All of the things that we do on earth, those things that are so routine and those things that are boring, they too are for us as God lays them on our plate the will of God.

Why? That we might adorn the gospel, adorn the gospel. That's why I think it's so wonderful that the Moody Church has the Moody Business Network. Our desire is to work with all those who have various professions, various responsibilities and vocations in the city of Chicago to help them to see that God has planted them there for the good of the gospel. We rejoice in the success of women in the working world. A marvelous impact on the women in the city of Chicago throughout the years as they have learned how to represent Christ best in the marketplace.

Why? Because everything has divine significance. You say yes but I struggle with this understanding of the will of God. Jesus said I came down from heaven not to do mine own will, not even Jesus did his own will, but the will of the Father who sent me. How blessed it is if we can accept our vocation within that light. Jesus said again labor not for the meat that perishes, for the bread that perishes, but for that which endures forever, that which endures forever. Every mundane act has divine significance if it's done for Christ. Secondly, we must change masters without changing jobs.

We must change masters without changing jobs. You'll notice that the text says and I've already read it, you are really to serve as if you are serving Christ because you actually are serving Christ. So tomorrow on Monday as you make the transition between Sunday and Monday, keep in mind that it is Christ whom you serve. It is Christ who hands you that paycheck at the end of the week. It is Christ with whom you have relationships.

It is he whom you represent to the people in your office, in your place of work. And what you do is you be the first to ask for forgiveness, to have a sense of humility. You be the first to be willing to give up some of your rights even as Jesus gave them up to come to this earth because you know that your agenda is higher.

It is a better agenda than that. Do you remember that legend about the time when Jesus was on earth that he said to his disciples please pick up a stone and they all picked up stones and they carried them for several days and afterwards they came to a mountain and Jesus said give me your stones and they gave Jesus their stones and then he turned every one of them into a loaf of bread. And some people's stones were bigger than others and so some of the disciples loaves of bread were bigger than the others. Then Jesus said to them I want you to pick up a stone again and this time they all picked up bigger stones.

It's only a legend but if it were true Peter would have picked up a very big stone. They carried them for days and days and days and Jesus did nothing with them and then they came to the river and he said take your stones and throw them into the river. So they threw their stones into the river and that was the end of it and they looked at one another as if to say what was this all about?

Why all this work for nothing? And then Jesus looked to them very lovingly and said for whom do you carry the stones? Does it matter whether I take a stone and turn it into bread or take a stone and have you throw it into the lake and you never see it again? Does it really matter if you're carrying those stones for me?

Does it really matter? You're doing it for Jesus anyway. So your boss is out of town and you have the run of the office and you've got all kinds of things that you could be doing now because there's nobody who's watching you so you can spend hours on the computer on your own personal things. Because everybody's doing it, nobody's seeing it and this is the way it works in America.

Ah yeah, that's the way it works in America. But your day belongs to Christ. Your day is Christ's day. At the end of the day it is not giving an account to your boss, he is the one who is watching and you serve as you serve him. Imagine the credible witness among all of those who are listening to this message right now. Imagine the credibility that you would gain not just in the eyes of your boss who's turned off to Christianity but in the eyes of all of the co-workers who wonder why it is that there is such a faithful person who does good things even when nobody is watching. And then when you have an opportunity you say listen if nobody were watching I'd be worse than you are but somebody is watching. Christ is watching.

That's the way we're going to capture America. Biblical view of work. Remember when Elizabeth Elliott was here she told us the story of how she spent one or two years in language study and had all of the results of all of these painstaking lessons on various verbs and nouns of this very difficult language written down. And all of her material was in a suitcase and the suitcase was stolen.

There were no Xeroxed copies in those days. They prayed so earnestly that the suitcase might be found but she never did find it. And somebody said to her Elizabeth weren't you angry at God because you worked so long and now look at all of that work was a waste.

She said none of it was wasted. I didn't do this work just so that the Indians might have a Bible. She said this was my sacrifice to Christ every morning when I woke up I said Lord today I serve you through language translation and that has never been lost.

Notice what the text says. You know that the Lord will reward everyone for whatever good he does. God's not forgotten about all those hours and hours and hours and hours of work. How did the gospel spread through China? Why is it that you have 50 million Christians in a communist land that still does not have a lot of freedom? Half million Christians when the missionaries pulled out in 1949 when Mao Zedong took over and now they say 50 million the experts tell us.

How did that work? I don't want to say this too loudly but it didn't happen through preachers. It didn't happen because they could have tracks and radio stations. In fact all of those were forbidden. They were forbidden. You can't do that in China.

At least you couldn't in 1984 when my wife and I were there and our children. Here you have these people working in factories making dresses and rugs and jugs and all kinds of stuff. China is filled with factories. From our standpoint terribly boring work but they have no alternative. They can't say well you know I don't like this job and I'm going to go to another city and get another.

You don't have freedom of travel. There you are. There you are. You're stuck with this sewing machine. That's all that you've got. Let me read it for you again. It is so important you must hear it.

Teach slaves to be subject to their teachers in everything to try to please them not to talk back to them not to steal from them but to show that they can be fully trusted so that in every way they will make the teaching about God our savior attractive. We were told that as the ladies would be sewing sitting together or whatever one would say to the other now why is it that you seem to be at peace? Why is it that you seem to be so happy today?

Everything's going wrong. And then the Christian would say you know it's because I have a higher agenda. I belong to Jesus Christ and I know God and that's the way the gospel spread. It's been said you know three men were on their knees chiseling some stones and a passerby said what are you doing? One said I'm chiseling stones. The other said I'm earning a living and the third said I'm building a cathedral all doing the same thing.

All the different perspective and and through the individual witness of all of these different vocations in China as as Christians were spread very sparsely throughout these vocations they witnessed and people came to Christ and the church today is as strong as it is stronger than the church in Taiwan where they have more freedom. I plead with you please when you go to work tomorrow please don't work for that boss. He's just a bum probably anyway. Please don't simply say I'm earning a living you have a higher calling.

There are people who work next to you who need to know Jesus as Savior and you need to make Christ look attractive. I always like to tell the story and some of you if you've been around long enough you've heard me tell it about Montana. In the 1850s there was a gold rush in Montana and a party of five or six people came across all kinds of gold in a riverbed but they had been out panning for gold for weeks and they were tired. Their tools were broken. A few of their members had actually died and so they said let's make a pact with one another. Let us make an agreement.

We will not tell anyone where the gold is. Let's go back to town. Let's regroup.

Let's get some new tools. Let's get some food. Let's get some new clothes and then on a certain morning we will all leave and we'll get all the gold for ourselves. So one morning they left and according to the story 50 of the townspeople followed them and they couldn't figure out why. They began to ask each other did you tell that we found gold? No I didn't tell. Did you tell? No I didn't tell. Did you tell?

No. You know what the townspeople said? We knew that you had found gold by the smile that was on your faces.

Tomorrow morning you're going to be next to people who need to know that you found some gold. Cynical people, people of other religions, people who are going to despise Christianity and God has called you into that matrix, that very one. You know sometimes people say well you know the reason that I as a Christian left this factory is because I was the only Christian in the factory. That's like people out in the mission field saying well you know the reason that I left this town in Romania is we were the only Christians there.

The fact that you are the only Christian there is all the more reason for you to stay. And so tomorrow you go with an attitude of obedience, not because of that boss but because of Christ. You go with an attitude of wholeheartedness. You ask God to give you a desire to serve and to serve well and you go anticipating. You know that Jesus is going to settle all the wrongs in your office. It's not your responsibility to make every single wrong right.

You do all that you can to bring justice especially for others but you're not so particular about yourself because this isn't the only world. There's another one coming and you believe that and you represent Christ to a very cynical nation that will never believe until we recapture a biblical understanding of the workplace. Will you join me as we pray? Our Father we thank you for the hundreds of people who are identified with Moody Church either as members or as friends, as attenders who tomorrow morning will be in the workplace with people who are angry, cynical, with bosses who are unreasonable and yet there they are. They know Christ. We pray today Father that you will work in the lives of your people such a fervency for Jesus and for others that they might so effectively represent Christ that people will know that those who believe in him are really truly different. Open the hearts and minds of those who are most hardened through the life of a consistent, loving, joyful Christian.

In Jesus' name, Amen. This is Pastor Lutzer. If you were to ask me the question, what is it that brings joy to my heart about the ministry of running to win, I would answer very quickly, it is when we receive letters about changed lives, which means changed hearts. For example, I'm holding in my hand a letter from someone who said that they were coming out of Catholicism, a Catholic background.

They did not hear much about Jesus but they did grow up with rules and regulations. Then the person says, I discovered you on the radio and God used your teaching to free me from my past and God is using trials to grow me. Yes, indeed, the freedom that is brought to us in Jesus Christ is what the ministry of running to win is all about.

Let me ask you a question. Have you been blessed as a result of this ministry? If the answer is yes, it's because other people invested in this ministry and you have benefited. Would you consider becoming an endurance partner? An endurance partner is someone who joins with us regularly with their prayers and their gifts.

Of course, the amount that you give is entirely your decision. Here is what you do because you do need info. I hope that you have a pen or a pencil handy. You go to rtwoffer.com. That's rtwoffer.com and when you're there, you click on the endurance partner button or you call 1-888-218-9337. As a matter of fact, you can actually call that number right now, 1-888-218-9337 or go to rtwoffer.com.

Click on the endurance partner button. You can write to us at Running to Win, 1635 North LaSalle Boulevard, Chicago, IL 60614. Pastor Erwin Lutzer has concluded, God the Center of Your Vocation, the 19th message in a series on Between Heaven and Earth, taken from Ephesians. Next time you're joining the Army, don't miss Dressed for Battle, our final message in a long series from Ephesians. This is Dave McAllister. Running to Win is sponsored by the Moody Church.