The Conscientious Christian Employee, Part 2

1 Timothy 6:1-2

Let's open our Bibles then this morning to 1 Timothy chapter 6.  We come again to this portion which we looked at by way of introduction last week, embarking on the last chapter of our study of this great epistle.  And the subject before us has to do with employment, with your job.  And that means it is a very practical portion of Scripture.

Just to set your thinking a little bit, in Genesis chapter 2 we read this in verse 15, "And the Lord God took the man and put him into the Garden of Eden to till it and to keep it."  The Fall of man didn't come until chapter 3.  In chapter 2, God designed man to work.  Man was created to be a worker.  He was created to work.  Work is not part of the curse, sweat is part of the curse.

It is the intensity of work necessary to earn the bread that implies the curse, but work is a blessing.  Man was created to work.

I want you to understand something at the very beginning of this.  Not only were we created to work but all of our work is a sacred duty, okay?  All of our work is a sacred duty...whatever your employment might be.  Now that may sound a little bit strange to you right off the top.  You may be looking at your job and saying, "I drive a truck, I don't see anything sacred about it."  "I am a carpenter, I don't see anything sacred about that."

"I work in a kitchen somewhere, cooking meals, it doesn't seem very sacred to me."  Somebody else might say, "I sell insurance."

Somebody might say, "I work in an office as a secretary or as a clerk,"  or "I work in a bank."  Or, "I'm a teller."  Or, "I'm a grocery bagger at the local market, how in the world is that sacred?"

It is sacred.  Whether you teach, whether you work on computers, whether you work on an assembly line, whether you paint houses, whatever it is that you do it is a sacred duty.

And in order for you to understand that you've got to draw a line somewhere in your mind that in...it's a circular line, not a straight line.  Erase the straight line between secular and sacred and draw a circle and put everything in your life in it.

Most people have drawn that line between secular and sacred and you need to erase it and put a circle around everything and it's all within the circle of sacred duty.

What do I mean by that?  I mean everything you do is with reference to your relationship to God.  Everything you do.  All work is sacred.  Even back as far as Martin Luther, he was trying very diligently to get people to perceive that the role of shopkeeper and the role of housewife, as he termed them, was as sacred as the role of clergy and priest in terms of its relationship and reference to God.  In fact, William Tyndale said, "There is different betwixt washing of dishes and preaching of the Word of God, but as touching pleasing God there is no difference at all."  Whatever you do, whatever kind of work you're engaged in, housewife to senior executive and everything in between, whatever it is it is a sacred duty.

Let me give you a statement that I thought through and I'll repeat it a couple of times.  I think it kind of embodies what it is that I want you to grab in your mind.  Every job, every task is of intrinsic value.  Every job and task is of intrinsic value not for its own sake, necessarily.  Some jobs do have intrinsic value for their own sakes, some do not.  But every job has intrinsic value not particularly for its own sake, but because when it is integrated into the life of a Christian it becomes the arena in which that Christian lives out his spiritual existence.  That's a very important thing to understand.  Every job, every task has intrinsic value, I don't care whether it's preparing a meal, making a bed, sweeping the floor, vacuuming, cleaning the garage, or whether it's when you go to your job and do your work there, every task you do has intrinsic value not necessarily for its own sake but because when it is integrated into the Christian's life it becomes the arena in which your spiritual faith is lived out.  That's basic to Christian living.

Let me take it a step further.  What is happening on the job for you is the single greatest articulation of Christianity that you will ever have in your life time, okay?  And there are people who sit around saying, "Boy, I've got to get to the mission field so I can get into a place where I can be effective,"  or "I do my ministry at the church,"  and I want you to know that all of that, of course, if the calling of God is vital, but the most vital place where Christianity will ever be expressed is in the face of the world and where that most commonly happens is in your job.

And if you do not see that as your sacred duty, then you're going to approach the thing in the wrong manner.

Let me take it even a step further.  You cannot be and I cannot be particularly concerned with how the job benefits us nearly so much as we are concerned as to how effective our work is in benefiting those around us by impacting them with the power of Jesus Christ to transform a life.

In other words, our day, as you well know, basically is a day of self‑indulgence.  So people work for self‑gratification.

They work to accomplish their own goals, their own ends and finance their own indulgences.  But a Christian thinks eschatologically.  A Christian thinks in terms of the Kingdom.  I work to advance the Kingdom.  I work to the glory of God.  I work with a view to eternal reward.  I work to see people saved.  And so everything I do and every response I make is covered by that kind of understanding.

John Calvin once said, quote:  "There is no part of life or conduct however insignificant which should not be related to the glory of God,"  end quote.  And that's simply another way to say 1 Corinthians 10:31, "Whatever you do, whether you eat or drink, do it all to the glory of God."

And let me take it a step further.  I believe the single greatest deterrent to the clear testimony of the saving grace of Jesus Christ occurs in the work place.  The single greatest impact is made there and the single greatest deterrent occurs there.  And how you work either speaks to the blessing and glory of God or to the blasphemy of His name.

Now that's what Paul wants us to understand in these two verses.  That how we work, how we function in an employment situation is of grave spiritual significance.  It takes us all the way back to the marvelous truth of Matthew 5 where our Lord said that you're a light and you're a city set on a hill, you're not to be hidden under a bushel, you're to let your light so shine, verse 16, that men in seeing your good works will glorify your Father in heaven.  And the idea, He used a little phrase in that verse "before men,"  the idea is to live your Christianity before men in such a way as to make the gospel noble and attractive.  And that happens more than anywhere else on your job.

I'm not so concerned for Grace Church that we come up with more methods of evangelism.  I don't think the real answer to evangelism is to have everybody trained in Discipleship Evangelism as important as that is.  I don't think the real answer to evangelism is to have all of you sign up for community evangelism training, although you ought to do that because you ought to know how to do that.  The real answer to effective evangelism is to have Christians so committed to Jesus Christ that they view their job as an arena in which it is vitally, vitally important for them to live out their faith.  When that begins to happen, then we hit the world right between the eyes because that's where they're watching.  That's what Paul is saying here.  Our Christian faith and our testimony are to be lived out in the sacred duty of our work which is rendered not only on behalf of men, but on behalf of God.

Now let's look at the text for a moment, let me read you the first two verses and we'll consider them together.  "Let as many slaves, doulo, as are under the yoke count their own masters worthy of all honor in order that the name of God and His doctrine not be blasphemed.  And they that have believing masters, let them not undervalue them because they are brothers but rather serve them all the more because they are believing and beloved partakers of the benefit.  These things teach and exhort."

Now I want you to remember what we said last week.  The terms "a slave and master"  should not throw us off.  We don't want to chuck this passage because we don't like the idea of slavery.  And what we spent our whole time Sunday, a week ago, covering was the idea that slave and master were terms to describe the general employment situation of the time in which the Scripture was written.  It was really a contracted method of employment.  And unless it was abused was a very manageable, very workable and even respectable and honorable mode of economic and social employment, it worked.  And as we saw last time, if the system itself was evil, the Lord would have spoken against the system.  If the system itself was evil, we would have heard about it in the Old Testament, we would have heard about it from Christ, we would have heard about it from the Apostles.  But nowhere is the system of what we call slave and master, and by that we are not talking about the kind of slavery, as I said last week, that we knew in this nation or other nations where it was racial and abusive, but where we're talking about contracted employment, the system itself is not evil.  The abuses are abuses due to the heart of man, not the nature of the system.

Now granted there were abuses of that slavery system in biblical times.  There were abuses in the Greco‑Roman world, particularly the Romans were abusive from time to time.  They did not permit some slaves to marry ever.  They had conjugal rights with women and when they gave birth to children, the children became more slaves.  They in many ways treated slaves as if they were animals, having no more rights than a beast of burden.

There were abuses particularly in the Roman area.  There were less abuses than that typically in Palestine where slavery was a little bit more minimal.  But surely there were abuses.  And there are abuses of any kind of economic or social system of employment.  We have it today.  And that's why people strike and march and cry against the difficulties of their own employment.

Abuse has to do with the heart, not necessarily the definition of a system.

For many slaves, as we saw last time, that system was excellent.  It provided security, good work, fair wages, met all their needs, all the needs of their family, brought them into a loving relationship domestically with another family.  And if hearts were right it was a very, very workable relationship.

Attitude was the issue.  The heart was the issue.  And that's why in the biblical testimony all you have is God speaking to the matter of men's hearts.  When Christ comes He does not come to overturn social order, He comes to change the heart.

When the Apostles speak, they speak not to overturn the social order but to change the heart.  In fact, when Philemon who was a well‑known slave owner with a New Testament book written to him lost his slave Onesimus who ran away and was, as Paul put it, very unprofitable to him, that slave ran into Paul in Rome.  And while Paul a prisoner in Rome meeting Onesimus, he was converted.

He believed the gospel preached to him by Paul, became Paul's friend, became very profitable to Paul.  In fact, became someone Paul would have wished to keep to serve him.  But not wanting to violate the contract which Onesimus had violated, he having led Onesimus to Christ then says you have to go back to your master from whom you have run and you have to go back into that service.

So he sends him back, sends along a letter, the epistle to Philemon.  In that letter he pleads with Philemon to take back his slave, to do it because he cares about Paul, to take whatever he has done that is wrong and charge it to Paul's account.

In other words, given a perfect opportunity to say to Onesimus in a biblical letter, "Look, this is a good thing.  This guy ran away and now he's converted because we've got to abolish slavery."  But instead of doing that, he sends the buy back to fulfill his obligation as a slave.  And so the Bible does not speak against the system, but it speaks to the issue of the heart.  Receive him with love, receive him with forgiveness, receive him with mercy and compassion and charge his costs and his iniquities and his transgressions against my account.  So he encourages them to make the system work.

So, when you're looking at slaves and masters, if the hearts are right you're looking to a very workable human system of contracted labor by which a person sold himself into the service of another person to offer them what they needed in behalf of a livelihood.

Furthermore, when we think of slave and master, we do not want to think negatively for the fact that the very term "slave"

has an intrinsic beauty and an intrinsic quality as made evident by the use of it on the lips of our Lord and the New Testament Apostles to describe a believer's relationship to God.  In 2 Timothy, for example, 2:24 it says the slave of the Lord.  Paul writing to Timothy really is calling Timothy the slave of the Lord, the doulos of the Lord.  And that's one of a myriad of texts so using that term.  The New Testament is filled with epistles that begin, "Paul, a slave of the Lord Jesus Christ...Peter, a slave of the Lord Jesus Christ...and so forth."

So, that was a beautiful term, a term of dignity, a term of submissive service that is given even greater dignity by being used metaphorically to speak of one's relationship to the Lord Himself.  Beyond that, the term "slave"  is used to speak of believer's relationship with others.  In 1 Corinthians 9:19 Paul says, "In my efforts to win the lost, the lost people, I become the doulos of all that by any means I might win some."  In other words, I have to see myself as a slave to the crying needs of lost men so that I can best serve those needs by caring compassionately for them and approaching them in a way that is acceptable to them.

Furthermore, in Galatians 5:13 Paul says as believers by love we are to be doulos one to another.  So I am not only a slave to the unbeliever to serve his spiritual need but I am slave to my brother in Christ in love to serve his need as well.

So when you see the word "slave"  here, you have to strip it of all of its kind of contemporary negative connotation and see here a workable employment relationship, one that can be well used as an illustration of one's relationship to God, one that speaks of how we ought to treat even unbelieving people as well as lovingly serve other Christians.  So there's nothing wrong with then taking the term "slave and master"  and translating them into what we would understand as employee and employer.  And I want you to do that in your mind.

Now remember, Timothy is in Ephesus, right?  Paul has come out of his imprisonment.  In the time that he has been away, the Ephesian church has...has really fallen on hard times.  It has declined tragically.  Paul was its founder.  Paul was its original pastor.  Paul is the one who ordained and trained the original elders.  The church had all the best beginnings.  It was used to found other churches in Asia Minor, modern Turkey.  It was a tremendously blessed and powerful church.  But by now the leadership has corrupted, the people have bought into ungodly behavior.  All kinds of tragic things are happening.  It has filtered down to the life style of the people so that in the work place they are denying and blaspheming the testimony of God.  And it is to that issue that Paul encourages Timothy to speak.

Let me give you the simple picture here.  In verse 1 we have the relationship between an employee and a non‑Christian employer.  In verse 2, the relationship between an employee and a Christian employer.  And the instruction in both of these verses has to do with having a right attitude and the reason why you're to have that attitude.  And I think, in a sense, like all the rest of 1 Timothy it tends to be polemic, that is it tends to speak against something that is happening there.  It's a battlefield, sort of.

Let me give you the illustration.  A Christian slave, right?

He's employed by a non‑Christian employer.  He goes to work and he recognizes that he's a child of God, he's an heir of God, he's headed for eternal glory, he's going to heaven.  God has selected him out of all the world to redeem him and he's excited about that.  He has a lot of fleshy attitudes.  He is a victim of the mood of the mob, as it were, in the church at Ephesus.  And among their sins of expressing their fleshy disobedient attitude would certainly be the possibility of him being proud about his spiritual identity and thinking himself superior to an unregenerate supervisor, manager, employer, boss or whatever.

And that's typically what would happen.

Not uncommon even today.  A Christian who is working under a non‑Christian tends to feel superior.  In fact, even intolerantly superior, even belligerently superior.  And after all, he's headed for hell and you're headed for heaven, after all you're elect and he's non‑elect.  And you're going to make sure you try to keep it that way.  And it's very easy for a person who is spiritually blessed to feel himself superior to a person who is spiritually bankrupt.  And his attitude of superiority begins to project itself in the way he responds to and the way he lacks respect for and the way he serves or does not serve his employer.

It's easy for that resentment to build up and if the guy does things you don't like, says things you don't like, and you just don't get along very well, that tendency toward a feeling of superiority is compounded.

I read recently about some company that was putting on some kind of health preparedness course and was taking systematically all their workers through all different kinds of diseases in order to help them to recognize them so they didn't bring some infectuous disease into the work place.  It was a large area with a lot of people in close contact.  And the instructor was asking one person, "What's the first thing you do if you found you had rabbis?"  Without hesitating the employee responded, "I'd bite my boss."  And I think there are a lot of employees who can really relate to that sentiment.  That's just really how it is out there.

As Christians we can be irritated by the unbeliever who doesn't understand us, who doesn't understand our ethics, who doesn't understand equity, who doesn't understand compassion or all of the spiritual things that we understand and we become by being a problem to him a discredit to Christ because if we are a problem to him, then the only Christ he may see is us and Christ becomes a problem to him.

On the other hand, let's assume that a Christian employee works for a Christian employer.  You say, "Boy, I wish I had a Christian boss.  Boy, wouldn't that be paradise?  Wouldn't that be perfect if I just had a Christian employer?"  But there's a tension there as well.  The attitude of a Christian employee who is sinful and fleshy and expressing a belligerent or disobedient spirit may come out in the sense that he feels equal to his employer and so he overrides the normal channels of authority.

In other words, because my boss is a Christian and I'm a Christian, I'm privileged.  As one employee said to me recently, "I don't go with any of that protocol stuff, you know, I know the boss and he and I are close because we're Christians.  I go right to him and bypass everybody else."  Well, your privilege, sir, is probably a serious discredit to the cause of Christ, right?

Because all the rest of the people who can't do that resent you because of your openness and the inability that they have to enjoy that same thing.  You can feel privileged over all the rest because you have this commonality in Christ.  You could even feel that that's an excuse for poor work and after all, you're a brother in Christ.  The worst he can do is come and give you step one discipline and you've still got two to go.  And if you repent on the first shot, you're in.  You might even think to yourself, "That because we're equal in Christ and because the Spirit dwells in me, I ought to tell him how he ought to run this company.  The Holy Spirit's been talking to me lately and giving me all the input."  Or you might even feel that you could get away with inadequate service without any negative consequence, or you might even feel that you can let your break time and your lunch time leak a little because you're studying the Bible or even better yet, listening to Grace to You, and it happen to go on a little past the end of your break time.

I mean, you understand the picture, don't you?  I mean, let's face it, in our sinfulness, working for an unsaved employer can create problems for us...an intolerant superiority.  But listen, having a Christian employer isn't going to necessarily change that or a Christian boss, or supervisor or manager, because there's still going to be a tension there for us to assume that in Christ we have just destroyed all normal social order, and that's not true.  Apparently that's exactly what was happening in the Ephesian congregation.  Their ungodliness, their lack of eusebeia, uses that word a lot of times in these epistles, their lack of godliness, their lack of holiness, their lack of understanding correct doctrine, their lack of having been taught properly had filtered all the way down so that they were not conducting themselves right before their non‑Christian or their Christian employers.  And so consequently in these brief two verses the Apostle Paul sums up the basics of attitudes necessary for a conscientious Christian employee.

Let's look at, first of all, verse 1.  And we'll just touch these, they're very simple and they'll speak, I'm sure, clearly to your heart as they do to my own.  Serving a non‑Christian master...first of all we look at attitude and then we look at the reason for it because attitude is always the issue.  Action/work flows out of attitude.

Now I want to give it to you in the Greek order because I think it puts the right emphasis.  So listen as we flow through the verse.  It starts in the Greek text this way, "As many slaves as are under the yoke..."  He introduces himself to the slaves, to the employees.  The word "slave"  again can be synonymous with employee.  The phrase "under the yoke"  does not necessarily indicate something abusive.  It does not mean that they were really burdened or that they were browbeaten, or that he was unjust or unfair.  It's simply a colloquialism to express a person's relationship of subjective...of subjected service.

Jesus used it in Matthew 11:28 to 30.  He said, "Take My yoke upon you and learn of Me for I am meek and lowly."  He said, "My yoke is easy, My burden is light and you'll find rest for your souls."  In a sense Jesus sanctified the yoke with those words.  When we enter into service to Christ, we put the yoke on.

That's a big wooden instrument placed over the necks of animals to pull things, pull plows, pull wagons or whatever.  And it's a symbol of service.  It's a symbol of submissive service.  And so what Paul is saying here is, "Any of you who are employed in a role of submissive service..."  It does not connote anything abusive or negative in terms of the actual conditions of that service.  It simply refers to all employees under the authority of someone else.  And that certainly really involves vast...the vast majority of all of us.  We all work for someone to one extent or another.  We all are answerable or accountable to someone.

So, to all of you people who are answerable to the authority of someone else, who are serving under someone, first of all, I require this attitude...  And the attitude is this, first he starts by saying, "Their own masters,"  he puts that first, "their own masters,"  the use of that little word "own", idion, is very interesting.  It implies a very personal bonding.  It's like Ephesians 5, their own husbands, their own wives.  It's a term of intimacy.  It's a term of bonding.  And the Spirit of God sees you as in some sense bonded to your employer.  You are called into your employment.  And there you are called to serve men.

You're not called to serve yourself.  Boy, we have lost that, as I said earlier.  We think we have a job for one reason and that's to make money to do what we want for our ownselves.  But the biblical approach to work would say, "No, we have a job on the human level to serve someone else, that my employment is my way of lovingly serving another person for the common good."

The Puritans were so heavy on that teaching.  Teaching continuously that work was to be perceived for the common good, and never to be perceived as a way in which you indulged yourself.  For example, the Puritan, William Perkins(?), said of work, quote:  "The true end of our lives is to do service to God by serving men."  John Calvin said, "We know that men were created to busy themselves with labor for the common good."  And Perkins again said, "Every man for himself is wicked and directly against the purpose of every calling."  And by the word "calling"

he meant employment.  And Martin Luther spoke in scorn of people who did not use their talents in the service of their neighbor, but used them only for their own glory and advantage.

The perception of a biblical work ethic is that I am serving my own boss, my own employer to whom I am bonded in some kind of intimate relationship whereby I offer to him the service he needs and he provides for me livelihood.  And there's a sense of intimacy there.  So he says, "All of you who are in an employment relationship, your own master...and here comes the attitude he wants...let them count worthy of all honor."  Let them count worthy of all honor.  That means you are to count your employer worthy of all honor.

Now the word "to count worthy"  is a verb that basically means to assess by objective criteria, not by internal feelings.  You may not feel very drawn to your employer, you may not feel like honoring him, but the assessment of the position and the relationship demands respect due to one who is providing your livelihood.  And you must keep in mind, number one, that I am serving him, I'm not serving me.  As soon as you perceive your employment as self‑serving, then you will fight against everything you do...everything you do will be self‑serving, self‑ indulgence.

That's why people strike all the time.  They don't care about the employment situation from the viewpoint of the employer.  They don't certainly care about the attitude they project very often.  All they care about is the demands that they have for themselves.  Now there are times when inequities do occur and equity can be brought out even from the negative thing of a strike or whatever.  But it does for the most part demonstrate the selfishness and the self‑gratification mode in which most people work.

So he says, "Look, you are to make sure that because of your employer's position you rightly assess that position, the dignity of it, the provision he is making for you.  And on the basis of that, consider him worthy of all honor,"  timos.  By the way, you remember the use of that word, don't you, in chapter 5 verse 3 where we are to honor the widow that is really a widow?  And in chapter 5 verse 17 where it talks about the elders that rule well being co