Issue 054
Does your behaviour at work sometimes amaze you?
Do you surprise yourself with your own unco-operative
attitude or your strange resentment? Do you find
yourself asking, “where did that come from?”
This amazement is more often applied to our
encounters with other people: the amazing greed in the
city around bonus time, the incredible deceit that is
endemic in the sales team, the competitive spirit which
causes one person to put another down or the
dishonesty in one person taking credit for another’s
idea.
Personnel departments are now employing CV-checking
companies because many people quite deliberately lie
on their CVs, fabricating qualifications they do not have
or inventing positions they never held.
Some people strut around the workplace as if they
owned it and expect others to jump at their every whim
or command. Only recently I heard stories of a quiet
employee who was found to be embezzling funds on a
grand scale.
In another area, workplace bullying and sexual
harassment is now reaching endemic proportions, whilst
office affairs before during and after hours are not
uncommon.
Office gossip and political manoeuvring are
Commonplace, and racism prevails in many institutions.
Women speak of continual discrimination and men of
the need to win at all costs.
Now the question is, where does it all come from?
Analysts speculate that it is because of the increasingly competitive and pressurised market. People find
themselves being forced to use underhand tactics to get
a job, keep a job or manage a bottom line. Corporate,
financial or organisational pressure, we are told, leads
people to behave in these ways.
According to Jesus Christ, this is the wrong diagnosis.
His diagnosis is that these things come out of our
hearts. They are not imposed from outside; they come
from the inside. He goes on to catalogue a list of thirteen evils which come from the human heart; in fact
I have illustrated many of them in this piece for you.
We should not be surprised or amazed at our
behaviours or that of others -. human hearts are like
that. The problem is that we persist with our wrong
diagnoses. Our cures come then with regulations, court
cases and acts of parliament. We need to go
deeper and ask the Spirit of God, who alone can change
the human heart, to be at work in us. That is something
worth being amazed about.
Mark 7: 18-22
18″Are you so dull?” he asked. “Don’t you see that nothing that enters a man from the outside can make him ‘unclean’? 19For it doesn’t go into his heart but into his stomach, and then out of his body.” (In saying this, Jesus declared all foods “clean.”) 20He went on: “What comes out of a man is what makes him ‘unclean.’ 21For from within, out of men’s hearts, come evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, 22greed, malice, deceit, lewdness, envy, slander, arrogance and folly. 23All these evils come from inside and make a man ‘unclean.’ “
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Work well
Geoff Shattock
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