Monday, January 18, 2010

Your Work Matters to God, Part 6 of 45

IDEA: How we handle faith and work may actually be heretical.

PURPOSE: To help listeners think seriously about their faith in Christ and their work.

Let me give you some career choices, and then tell me how they would be rated on a scale of 1 to 10 by many sincere Christians:

Being a pastor, a seminary professor, a missionary, a religious broadcaster.

Being a truck driver, a farmer, a TV repair person, a barber or an assembly-line worker.

Being a real estate developer, a banker, a broker, an advertising person.

Being a physician, a dentist, a nurse, a teacher, a counselor, a mother.

What criteria are at work in making these choices the way we do?

I. Is it possible that many orthodox Christians are heretics in the way they think about work?

What is a heresy? It is any deviation from accepted orthodoxy.

What is Docetism?

Docetism comes from the Greek word dokeo, meaning "to seem, to appear to be."

The Docetic heresy taught that Christ wasn't a real human being who actually suffered and died on the cross. He was merely a spirit whose body was unreal. Why do you think this heresy was spawned?

This way of thinking is sometimes unwittingly embraced by Christians.

It said that there were two stories (as in a building): one was spiritual and the other was secular.

Your soul was a precious jewel and your body was only the box it was in. We want to do "soul winning."

The "spiritual" and the "eternal" are very important to God, and the secular and the ordinary are much less important to God.

The early church condemned this heresy because all of life is important to God. Romans 12:1-2 tells us to present our bodies to God. Whatever you do with your body matters to God.

II. What do you think the implications are of that when it comes to faith and work?

Is there a difference between the secular and the sacred? What is it?

This attitude makes most of us "second-class" Christians. We get only a brief time each week to devote our gifts to "spiritual things" or "eternal matters."

There is even a hierarchy in "religious work." Missionaries and evangelists are often ranked in people's unspoken rankings over pastors. Why?