Issue 318
It’s so very easy to miss a detail when Jesus of Nazareth opens a window into his soul. Your vision can be so focused on what you think you see, that you overlook what is in front of you; so it often occurs that when you see the word “work” in his sentences, you can let your mind’s eye wander to something completely other than that which occupies your time for a portion of every day.
So when, as team leader with his team gathered around Jacob’s well, he explains his dynamic of work, why not have a look at the powerful, relevant lessons which cascade onto the table forming a feast for you to enjoy?
As you have already seen, if you read the last piece on nourishment, Jesus described a source of food that his team knew nothing about. If you stay with his words you will notice several ingredients that make up this food:
Firstly, he describes his work as given to him by his Father whom he describes as the one who sent him. Here again, Jesus adds Father to everything, in this case without actually using the word. The emphasis this time is on the sense of being sent. For work to be food – or more accurately, for you to be able to feed on your work – you need a sense of being sent. This sense is not reserved for an elite spiritual ‘special forces’ type of work, but is meant to be discovered in all work.
If you keep looking you can see that Jesus, secondly, describes work as “His work”; this is nothing new; Jesus, from the age of twelve, described himself as being about His Father’s business.
Ingredient three emerges from the clear implication that work food is to be found when we see work as a gift and commission from God. Ingredients are beginning to mix-up – they taste better that way.
Fourthly, Jesus talks about the importance of finishing; nutritious work contains the element of completion. It is fashionable today to speak of some who are great at starting and others who are ‘completer finishers’. This is fair enough, but there has to be a good finish built into a good start;.starting will involve finishing your part in a project, even if that project requires someone else to take it to its final completion.
So keep stirring these ingredients, a sense of being sent, your work as the Fathers work, as a gift from him, and requiring finishing. Add one important dash of spice now – namely, that the content of work is about doing the will of God.
Here’s the puzzle piece – when you start finding these ingredients as they relate to your current work then you’ll discover that you can do God’s will where you are and you can feed on your own work. Once you realise that it is how you see your work and how you connect it to your God that makes all the difference, then you have begun to decode the recipe.
Its time to start cooking.
John 4:34-38
34 “My food,” said Jesus, “is to do the will of him who sent me and to finish his work. 35 Do you not say, ‘Four months more and then the harvest’? I tell you, open your eyes and look at the fields! They are ripe for harvest. 36 Even now the reaper draws his wages, even now he harvests the crop for eternal life, so that the sower and the reaper may be glad together. 37 Thus the saying ‘One sows and another reaps’ is true. 38 I sent you to reap what you have not worked for. Others have done the hard work, and you have reaped the benefits of their labor.”
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Work well
Geoff Shattock
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