Thursday, January 28, 2010
Your Work Matters to God, Part 14 of 45
IDEA: All legitimate work is inherently good, but because of sin, none of our work completely fulfills God's intentions.
PURPOSE: to show that while work is good and a gift from God, it takes place within an evil world.
What have we discovered about work? All legitimate work is inherently good.
- What do we mean by "inherently good"?
- What do we mean by "legitimate work"?
Is there anything else that we have to wrestle with in affirming that all legitimate work is inherently good?
I. What place do sin and evil play in qualifying our assertions about work?
Because of sin, none of our work completely fulfills God's intentions.
We can work with mixed motives. We do the right things for the wrong reasons.
We can hurt other people in a competitive society. When one business thrives, another business is destroyed, and people are involved. (Case study of Christians in competition with each other in a small town.)
Our work can take the place of God in our lives.
How can "good" businesses and professions be affected by the fall?
II. There are situations in which people are doing legitimate work, but they work in sinful environments.
What about people who work by making clothes or running shoes in sweatshops? What's legitimate and illegitimate about that work?
Some jobs waste human resources or pollute them.
Do you think God smiles when some workers are subjected to agonizing routine and monotony? It reduces someone who was made in the image of God to being a robot or a machine.
While all legitimate work is inherently good, there are conditions and factors that sin creates that move our work away from God's ideal. How do we as Christians deal with that?
