Discover The Word

Monday, January 11, 2010

IDEA: Christianity puts a halo around our daily work.

PURPOSE: To help listeners see that Christians understand that their negative view of work comes because they have divorced their Christian faith from daily life.

If you were to talk to the average Christian and ask, “Does selling insurance, or running a laundromat, or collecting garbage, or farming, or being a secretary, or driving a truck matter to God?” what do you think they would say?

Do you think that Christian leaders see a clear relationship between the Christian faith and daily work?

I. If an outsider were evaluating our churches, would they see a strong link between the Christian faith and work?

Pastors visit hospitals, sometimes visit homes, but seldom visit people where they work.

The average person spends between 40% and 75% of his or her life in work-related tasks. Yet in one survey, 90% of Christians say they have never heard a sermon or listened to a tape or been to a seminar that applied biblical principles to work. Why do you think this is?

II. How important do you think daily work is to the average person?

Work determines where we spend a good deal of our time.

Work sometimes determines where we live.

In some measure, it determines our friends.

III. Christianity appears to be irrelevant, even antagonistic, to the world of work.

Dorothy Sayers asked, “How can anyone remain interested in a religion which seems to have no concern with 9/10ths of his life?” [from her lecture, “Why Work?”]

The neglect of work in our churches ignores the truth that Christianity puts a halo around our daily work.