Practical ways for your pastor to encourage Mere Christians in their work
5 easy ways for your pastor to encourage Mere Christians in their work this Sunday, how to better understand your biblical call to be a “priest” at work, and 5 circles of influence to pray through in your job.
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[0:00:05.4] JR: Hey, friend. Welcome to the Mere Christians Podcast, I’m Jordan Raynor. How does the gospel influence the work of mere Christians, those of us who aren’t pastors or religious professionals but who work as compliance officers, logging workers, and magistrates? That’s the question we explore every week and today, I’m posing it to Matt Rusten, the president of Made to Flourish.
Listen, one of the most frequent questions I ever get is, “Jordan, what tools do you have for me to give my pastor to help him talk about work more frequently and encourage me and other mere Christians in our vocations?” This episode is one of my answers to that question. Matt and I get really practical here, given that this is the work that Matt and his team are doing day in, day out and my prayer is that you would listen and share this episode with the pastors in your life.
But don’t worry, there’s plenty for you in this episode as a mere Christian as well. Matt and I talked about five easy ways for your pastor to encourage mere Christians in their work this Sunday, it takes like no prep they can implement in the next few days. We talked about how to better understand your biblical call to be a priest at work and five circles of influence to pray through in your job.
I loved this helpful framework that Matt shared. Trust me, you are not going to want to miss this great episode with my friend, Matt Rusten.
[INTERVIEW]
[0:01:40.8] JR: Matt Rusten, welcome to the Mere Christians Podcast.
[0:01:43.6] MR: Hey Jordan, how’s it going? Thanks for having me on today.
[0:01:45.7] JR: How in the world has it taken this long to get you on? It’s like a gross oversight.
[0:01:52.2] MR: I don’t know. It was time, Jordan, glad to be joining you today.
[0:01:54.5] JR: We’ve hung out a few times on Zoom and I’m like, “Matt’s never been on the show, this is great.” All right, hey, let’s start here, what’s Made to Flourish, this organization that you lead?
[0:02:03.8] MR: Yeah. So, Made to Flourish is an organization, we work with pastors and churches across the country, and we’re trying to provide tools and resources to equip churches to basically equip their people to connect Sunday and Monday that they would integrate their faith with their work and economic wisdom, for the flourishing of their communities.
So, it’s really taking, “How does this gospel that we profess, how is this bible that we look to, how does it impact our Monday worlds?” And of course, all churches have a desire to make more and better disciplines and we’re asking the question, “Where do most disciples of Jesus spend their time following him?” And it’s in in their work on Monday through Saturday, whether that’s paid or unpaid. So, providing churches resources to bring that conversation along.
[0:02:51.7] JR: that’s good Made to Flourish is the B2B version of Jordan Raynor, right? Like, I’m going direct to the mere Christian. You guys are doing the wise work of partnering with the church and I’m going to be doing more, then I’ll talk about that here in a few minutes but you guys are doing phenomenal work in this space, which is why I wanted you here. Hey, what’s the founding story of Made to Flourish? This is founded by our mutual friend, Tom Nelson, right?
[0:03:15.3] MR: Yeah, that’s right. So, Tom was a pastor, serving in Kansas City, a multi-site church, and in the mid-2000s, he had a moment where he really came to a deep level of conviction that he had been doing what he called pastoral malpractice. He actually had this very dramatic moment on a Sunday morning, and he announces to his congregation, “Hey, listen, I’ve been committing pastoral malpractice.”
[0:03:40.0] JR: I love that term.
[0:03:40.8] MR: Of course, here in the congregation on a Sunday morning and you're thinking, “What’s my pastor about to say?” You know?
[0:03:45.5] JR: What’s about to happen? Right.
[0:03:48.0] MR: But basically, what Tom goes on to say is, “This is not about moral impropriety, this is not about financial shadiness but I’ve been spending a majority of my time equipping you for a minority of your lives.”
[0:03:59.9] JR: Yes.
[0:04:01.2] MR: And he just said, “I can't keep doing that. I've come to that conviction looking at the scriptures, especially the early chapters of Genesis, the biblical story. As I look back at the reformers, this is just a huge theme that God's people, their vocations, their sense of calling and the work that they do has to be a much greater emphasis.” So, he made that change in the mid-2000s and honestly, probably didn’t know fully what it meant but he just said, “We got to make changes.”
Several years later, he would go on to write the book, Work Matters, and kind of one of the early books, of course, there is a lot of books on faith and work but it was really his personal testimony as a pastor, making changes in his church and then in 2015, he would go on to start and I was employee number one, Made to Flourish, to help churches around the country think more deeply about these issues.
[0:04:47.2] JR: I love it so much. Why do pastors commit this pastoral malpractice? Because this is still fairly common. Why do pastors not talk more about the thing that the mere Christians are spending 40 to 50 hours of their week doing?
[0:04:59.7] MR: I mean, listen Jordan, I was a pastor for many years. I love pastors, we work with pastors, I’m not going to throw pastors under the bus because I know I miss this and sometimes, there is actually a study done by Denise Daniels and Elaine Howard Ecklund. Denise is at Wheaton, Elaine Howard Ecklund is now at Rice, and they asked in the survey pastors, “How much do you talk about themes about work and how the gospel applies to people’s work?” The pastors in the survey said, “Quite a bit.”
[0:05:27.5] JR: That’s exactly what I would expect, yeah.
[0:05:29.1] MR: Yeah, yeah. They asked that exact same question to the congregation members and they said, “Oh, hardly at all.”
[0:05:35.5] JR: Yeah, interesting.
[0:05:37.0] MR: So, there’s a disconnect in what pastors think they’re communicating and what people are actually hearing and listen, I know, sometimes my best-laid plans to get my message across don’t’ land. So, that can just happen but I think there are a few reasons why pastors maybe don’t prioritize this quite as much as people hear them doing.
One is, just the rise of cities, sort of the professionalization of the pastoral work, the full-time ministry. I knew when I was a pastor I could spend 90% of my work week, 95% of my work week in my office, preparing for people to come to the church, preparing for different programs I was running, preparing for my Sunday morning, and I actually spent very little time with where people were at.
I was talking to a business guy in South Carolina earlier this year and he said, “You know, Matt, shepherds, they smell like sheep,” And he’s like, “But do we actually small like our sheep? Because we’ve been so close to them, so where they’re at, that we know their lives and are around them.” So, I think that’s one thing, just proximity, familiarity but I – we also teach this idea of specificity in the ways that pastors communicate about work.
I think it’s Haddon Robinson, the great teacher of preachers. He has this article where he talks about preaching to no one in particular and when you offer sort of broad platitudes and broad applications to people’s work, sometimes it just goes right over our heads as congregation members, and we don't hear it. One of the most often quoted faith and work quotes from a famous preacher, Martin Luther King Jr. is posted every Labor Day on people’s Twitter, Facebook.
[0:07:19.7] JR: The janitor quote?
[0:07:20.8] MR: Well, he talks about the street sweeper.
[0:07:22.5] JR: Yeah.
[0:07:22.8] MR: You know, if your job is a street sweeper, may you sweep those streets as Michelangelo painted and he goes on and on. I’ve sometimes wondered like, how many street sweepers did Martin Luther King have in his congregation? One, two, zero?
[0:07:36.5] JR: Did that quote really land in the moment?
[0:07:38.4] MR: Yeah, but there’s something about applying it to a specific scenario that lands with us. I’ll just tell one more very quick story, one of my favorite examples of this is Dallas Willard. He’s writing The Divine Conspiracy, and he’s applying the sermon on the mount, teachings of Jesus, and he gets to this part where he’s talking about relying on the Holy Spirit for his empowerment through prayer.
How do you rely in the Spirit's power? Well, you're a preacher, how are you going to apply that to people’s work? Here’s what Dallas does. He says, “Imagine you’re a plumber and you’re going to a job and it’s a tough job. You don’t know how you’re going to get it done, you’re shimmying on your back underneath the house and it’s dark, it’s cold, you finally get to the pipe, you don’t have the right tools, you have no idea how you’re going to fix this.”
“There’s one thing in that moment you must never say. You must never say, “It’s just me in the pipe.” He says, “It’s never just you in the pipe. In that moment, you call down the spirit’s power, you ask them for a creative idea, you ask them for a solution, you ask for something that will lead you to an answer or a way to deal with your client that day, and you know what you’ll find? You’ll find over time, that actually, God answers and empowers you in that moment of need.”
“And if you build in your life, a rhythm of thanking God for those answers, you’re going to become the sort of person over a lifetime that experiences the power of God in your everyday life.” Well, here’s the deal, Jordan. I’m the furthest thing from a plumber. Like, I’m never going to do that. I don’t have any of those competencies but when he says it’s just, “It’s never just you in the pipe.” I’m like, “Okay, that’s right.”
It’s never just me in the sermon, it’s never just me in the Word document, it’s never just me in the meeting, and I think for a lot of pastors and preachers, to take that next step towards specificity will help a lot of people hear the message.
[0:09:27.5] JR: That’s good, that’s really good. All right, we’ve talked about why pastors don’t talk about this more but I have a lot of empathy here, right? Because I’m an elder in our church and have this conversation with my pastor frequently and pastors are being told by everybody that they need to preach more about different things, right?
Pastor is being told, you need to talk more about justice, you need to talk more about gender, you need to talk about mercy in the poor. Let’s build a case right now though, you and me, man. Why work, right? Why should we spend more time talking about the vocations of the mere Christians in the pew?
[0:09:59.1] MR: Yeah. My temptation is to start theologically in the biblical story just because that is like – I just love that stuff, but I’m going to instead start with my dad. My dad passed away earlier this year and he was a good dad, he lived a great life but my dad was a superintendent of schools in tiny towns in North Dakota and Minnesota. So, not glamorous like this is you know, population 500 people at a town, maybe 150 students in the school.
But his work meant a lot to him. He’d worked 40, 50, 60 hours, trying to give these rural kids a chance to develop their full potential, to go on and to live out whatever calling they had in their life. It meant a lot to him and then there was Sunday, and we never miss church, Jordan. We were in the pews every single Sunday like we were just there. So, my dad has these two aspects of his life, his superintendent work and his church life.
But as I reflected back on that, I don’t think there was one time in all his years of going to that small church that he ever once heard from his pastor. “Ken, God has you exactly where he wants you. Like, you are living on mission, and by the way, how can we pray for you? I know that you said you got a board meeting coming up and you’re trying to pass a tight budget. Like, how can we be in prayer for you?”
I know that would have meant a tremendous amount to my dad. So, I just want to start and say like before we get to the Bible, before we get to theology, this is just the shepherding, this is a shepherding issue.
[0:11:29.9] JR: It’s a shepherding thing because it bridges – I hear people use this term all the time, “Jordan, before I discovered these truths, I felt like I lived in two different worlds, right?” I felt this disintegration and like these biblical truths have bridged those two worlds together and led me to a more integrated whole life. I’m more fully alive because I understand how these two worlds connect together. That’s really good.
[0:11:55.1] MR: Yeah. that’s my first answer. Before we get to theology, just like if you want to be a shepherd of God’s people, figure out where they’re spending most of their time, pray for them there, encourage them there, and by the way, that’s not like an American thing. That’s not like a white color thing. That is a through church history in all parts of the world thing. There is a shepherding – I don't know if you want me to tick through this or not but I think –
[0:12:16.2] JR: Yeah, sure.
[0:12:16.3] MR: You know, there’s a church historical, I mentioned kind of through all church history but even if you go back to the protestant reformation, I imagine we have listeners across the theological spectrum but I imagine that many of our listeners are probably come from a protestant background and the protesters, right? Martin Luther, they weren’t necessarily trying to start a whole new wing at the church.
But one of the reformations that they made was this – not only the perspicuity of scripture, not only salvation by grace alone, through faith alone and Christ alone but thirdly, it was the recovery of vocation. It’s not just the priest, it’s not just the monk who can live like this perfect holy life. It’s the dad who changes the diaper of the baby that is doing a work that is as holy and if we don’t want to make the mistake of sort of the middle ages that was so rampant, then we have to recover to this idea of the priesthood of all believers.
And just realizing that not everyone is a pastor, that is an amazing calling but every follower of Christ is a priest and their parish, to quote Cory Wilson, “Their parish is their place of work, whether that’s paid or unpaid.” So, there’s a church historical answer. You probably talk a lot about the bible and theology, I don't know if I should go there at this point but –
[0:13:31.6] JR: Well, hang on, I want you to drill down, we throw around priests and all believers, I Peter a lot.
[0:13:35.8] MR: Yeah, yeah.
[0:13:36.6] JR: Draw out the distinctions between the pastor and the priest that is every near Christian.
[0:13:42.3] MR: Yeah. Pastor, it’s a word that means a shepherd. So, you’re –
[0:13:46.5] JR: Tending the flock.
[0:13:47.8] MR: You’re the coach of the team, you’re tending the flock but there’s a huge elevation that happens and this is not just in I Peter, right? It’s just the people of God throughout the history of the bible. There were to be a kingdom of priests back in Exodus that would show God’s goodness, not merely in the temple, or excuse me, the Tabernacle but especially in the marketplace, as they showed his righteousness and interacted with the nations out there.
Of course, that theme would continue in exile, when the people go into exile in Jeremiah, they’re supposed to seek the good of their cities but the priest essentially does two things if you look at kind of the role of the high priest and the priesthood in Israel. Number one, they represent God’s character and His ways in the world by knowing the law and by living those things out. That was the kingdom of priest idea in Exodus.
But secondly, they were called to intercede for the nations. So, Moses, the ultimate kind of first priest with his brother Aaron, he’s interceding for his people. He’s an intercessor, there’s the sense of interceding for the nations as well. This is true and God’s people go into exile but I think this is one of the most practical implications. So, you work at a department store or you work at a mechanic shop, you’re a priest in that place. You’re not just a mechanic, you're a priest who is a mechanic.
[0:15:07.0] JR: How are they interceding? How’s the mechanic interceding?
[0:15:09.9] MR: So, I just do this little thing. Like, make five circles, an intersecting circle is like a big target. In the middle of that circle, put me. In the second circle, put my team. In the third circle, put my clients. In the fourth circle, put my company, and then in the fifth circle, put my industry, and you can just – this takes like three minutes.
You can just walk through those five four layers of the onion, of the circles. Well, it starts with me. God, today, I’m a mechanic, in the shop. “God, there’s so much pressure, we’re biting each other’s heads off when it’s high-stress. I ask that you would…” I would exemplify the peace of Christ to my coworkers. Second of all, my team. “God, there’s a lot of hurt. I think of Jimmy on our team who is going through a hard time at home. I lift up Jimmy. I ask that he would sense that you are real and that you care about his life, help me to communicate that to him, help us to work well together.”
Third of all, our clients. “God, people are coming in, they’re just trusting a mechanic, I ask that we would give them assurance that we’re there to help them and treat them with justice and kindness and fairness and help them in a timely way.” Fourthly, my company. “God, I pray for the owner of this mechanic shop. I pray that you would help him. He’s under a lot of stress that he would be the sort of person that would create a just, good, environment.”
And then for our industry, travel and people rely on it every day. “I pray that we would be an instrument of your grace, helping people get back on their feet and showing your ways and your kindness to our community.” So, that’s just like, that doesn’t have to be the only way but, there’s some way that you think, “I’m a priest who is a mechanic. How do I think about interceding for myself and those around me in a way that I can do each day?”
[0:16:48.3] JR: I love it. Hey, in just a couple of minutes, we’re going to get really practical about what Made to Flourish is doing to help pastors talk more about work but real quickly, I want to round out this “Why should the church be talking more about work?” real quickly and you gave us some great reasons. I want to add a couple. Number one, yeah, we should probably talk about the things that God talks about, right?
And he talks about work a lot, a lot. Our mutual friend, Hugh Whelchel has pointed out that the scripture mentions work more than 800 times, that’s more than every single mention of worship, music, praise, and singing combined. Just out of balance with what we talk about in our churches.
I would say, number two, work outside the four walls of the church is our best shot at making disciples of Jesus Christ in this post-Christian context, and number three, personally, I think teach in our work and I would love some academics to go get some data to bear this out. I think, teaching our work is one of the most effective ways to close what my friend, Skye Jethani, calls the license-to-license gap.
I never heard of this until a couple of years ago. Do you know what Skye’s referring to here, Matt?
[0:17:49.5] MR: I think I’ve heard Skye talk about this but I’m forgetting exactly what it is. Remind me.
[0:17:53.4] JR: Yeah. So, this is basically like, “Hey, pastors know that by and large, they’re going to lose people between the moment they get their driver's license and the moment they get their marriage license, right?” And what are they doing between their driver’s license and their marriage license, they are thinking about two things: Dating, which the church talks plenty about because we love talking about sex, right? And work, which very few pastors talk about.
And so, listen to Skye, I love this Skye quote. He says, “Young people perhaps, more than previous generations have a strong sense of their specific calling. They believe that God has called them into business, the arts, government, the household, education, the media, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera, but when their specific callings are not acknowledged by the institutional church, the young are unlikely to engage.” And I think that’s spot on, right?
Every time we hear a new study about young people leaving the church, we love to blame liberals, we love to blame culture but I wonder if we’re partly to blame, right? Because after our kids walk the aisle and prayed the prayer, we didn’t validate their God-given desire to make this world more useful and beautiful for other human being’s benefit and enjoyment and so Skye is like, “Hey, you want to close the license-to-license gap? Talk about work.” I don’t think it’s the silver bullet but I think it’s one of them. What’s your take on that?
[0:19:15.0] MR: Well, I think there’s a lot of smart people that are saying the same thing. So, the Fuller Youth Institute, Kara Powell, the work that she’s done, they see especially in kind of young adults in student ministries, you have to hit the theme of vocation. Of course, David Kinneman has hit this in Barna, his book, You Lost Me. He talks about kind of five integration areas and vocation is a central one.
But I also think of the Christians that work study, that came out by Barna probably five, six years ago and they basically said two things. They said, your most interested group of individuals for faith and work are single, college-graduated, young women. They're the ones that are most eager to have these conversations, just like kind of statistical basis and then he said, this is kind of second point, maybe not quite as related.
But he said that the most people that are frustrated with their sense of calling and their work and their faith is young moms because now, they come, and sometimes they’re wrestling with coming out of the workplace or, “How do I wrestle with these tensions and caring for this child?” and so those two groups but that first group you think, “Gosh if we want to reach young, single women, they are the group that is most interested.”
But I think the same is true of young men to reengage them, to say, “Gosh, you’re thinking about career.” Rather than kind of putting it on a hierarchy, you think about Jesus first and then your work. Why don’t we instead, move God and the gospel into the center? And to say, “You’re spending all this time and work, what does it look like to God to bring him to the center of that place where you’re spending so much time?”
[0:20:45.7] JR: It’s good. All right, so, what’s Made to Flourish doing to help pastors to that end? How are you guys solving this problem?
[0:20:51.2] MR: We want to spark an imagination just through great resources that tell stories about how this can be done. The primary way we do that is through our Common Good Magazine. So, if you are a pastor out there, you can go madetoflourish.org and we’ll send you a free gift, you’ll get a free subscription to our magazine, it comes out quarterly. Anyone can get that also, you go to commongoodmag.org and sign up for a magazine. We’d love to have you with us.
[0:21:16.6] JR: P.S. Little shameless plug for you. I think this is one of like three pieces of content I subscribe to. I mean, I really, really love it.
[0:21:26.1] MR: Well, thanks for that, Jordan. Of course, we’ve featured your work, we are going to be doing that in our next issue as well. So, we love that you’ve contributed and helped that resource along. We realize we have to move past just kind of helping pastors and churches with an imagination of this though and the primary tool that we get churches started with is a skill mapping survey.
[0:21:46.7] JR: Yes, I was hoping you were going to talk about this. Tell us more, I love this.
[0:21:50.5] MR: So, Sunday morning the pastor says, “Hey, we’re going to take the next four to five minutes, and we’re a church that says we love our city, that we want to serve one another, and we just realized we don’t know where you’re at in the city. For most of the week, we don’t know what your skills are to serve us and our partners. So, we’re going to take five minutes if you could help us understand, number one, what skills do you possess?”
That could be related to your job or not but what skills do you have that God has equipped you with? “Secondly, what’s your daily work? Whether that’s paid or unpaid or retired or whatever season of your life are you in and then thirdly, what areas do you have a passion to serve?” We’re going to collect that data, that’s going to help us be a more loving church, a more well-equipped church because we want to think about the assets that God has entrusted you with and what that means for our church.
So, we help a church collect that data, we have an online tool that can display that data, and then once the church has collected kind of that data on who got us brought to their congregation, we want to help them say, “How does that apply to your worship gathering?” Number one, number two, “How does this impact your discipleship pathways, whatever they are?” And then thirdly, “How does it impact your sense of outreach and ministry in the community?” So, collecting data and then using that data in kind of the practical day-to-day of church life.
[0:23:04.5] JR: You sent me like I think one of the earliest drafts of this skill mapping tool. I'm like, "This is freaking great!" I love it and it's like super cheap. Like, how much is this for churches to do this skill-mapping thing?
[0:23:14.9] MR: It’s about a hundred dollars, actually, USD 95 per site of a church. So, if you are a multi-site church, it’s 95 for each site but yeah, 95 bucks.
[0:23:22.2] JR: That’s a certain price point, I love it so much, and you could find that at madetoflourish.org, no affiliate link below, I promise. Hey, listen, this is great but it’s going to take pastors, you know, a couple of weeks to get this integrated. We’re dropping this episode on a Wednesday, I want to offer any pastors listening or any mere Christians who are going to send this episode to their pastors some things they could do by this Sunday to help the mere Christians in their pews see and respond to the sacredness of their seemingly secular work.
And you guys have one of my favorite practices to this end. Can you talk about this time tomorrow?
[0:23:55.2] MR: Yeah. So, this is a simple rhythm and we’ve seen a lot of churches adopt this. You basically take five minutes on a Sunday morning, you invite someone to your congregation up to the front, and you ask them just three or four short questions. Number one, what are you going to be doing this time tomorrow? So, just give me a day in the life of your work paid or unpaid, and let the people talk about that for a minute or two.
And then you say, “How is your job an opportunity to love your neighbor, to show grace, to show God’s kindness to others?” and just let them talk about how they see God in their work. Thirdly, how do you see the brokenness of the world through your work? It could be in yourself, it could be in those you work with. How do you see God’s or the brokenness of the world? And then finally, “How can we pray for you?”
“And oh, by the way, as we pray for you, all of those we’re interviewing and nurses today, and Jane, and if you are in the medical field, we want to lift you up too” and you just pray a prayer of commission that they would be the hands and feet of Jesus.
[0:24:54.6] JR: Man, I love it. I have seen the "this time tomorrow" interview in person and like loved it. It's one of my favorite practices and again, super easy. You could implement this upcoming Sunday. Let me add a couple more to the list for our pastors. I love that we both came with notes and can like compile a list together. Number one, real low-hanging fruit, make sure every sermon's application has a workplace example as specific and concrete as possible, right?
Call up the plumber, the street sweeper in your sermon this Sunday. Number two and you alluded to this with this time tomorrow, you commission mere Christians. If you have a nurse coming up on stage, right? For this time tomorrow, great but if you don’t want to do this time tomorrow, there’s other easy ways to do this. You know, I think the unsaid things in our churches are some of the most powerful things we say.
And when the only people we ever see commissioned in our churches are pastors and full-time missionaries, the very clear, very powerful unsaid message is that mere Christians in the pews on the JV team while everyone else is on team varsity, right? And I think by commissioning different vocations for the work or the first commission, the great commission can be such a simple way of doing this.
I actually put together a calendar of different vocations I would recommend the churches commission on a monthly basis. So, for example, in September, commission educators, anyone, homeschool teachers, public school teachers, whatever, stand up, we’re going to commission educators for the work of the Lord that you are doing in your schools. November, retail employees. Black Friday is coming, we need to pray for you, stand up.
January, healthcare professionals, we’re in the middle of flu season, right? So, we’re releasing this in January. Do this this Sunday, ask any healthcare professional stand up, bless them, commission them for the work of the Lord that they are doing, and here’s the last idea all throughout, this is the first book I’ve ever done this with but in The Sacredness of Secular Work, I’m actually giving just tons of free sermon outlines to pastors in the back of the book for free.
You’ve read the book, the chapter on the Underbridge gospel, and half-truths about heaven, these are meaty things that can easily be a five-week series, I'm just giving them away for pastors for free so that you can preach through this stuff. Yeah, so just a few tools, you could find a lot of those in the back of The Sacredness of Secular Work endorsed by among others, the great Matt Rusten.
[0:27:14.6] MR: It’s a great book, Jordan. I am looking forward to it coming out, really, really excited about it, and let me just say real quick like really Jordan? Like, preach on it every Sunday? I’m not sure that I’m with you there.
[0:27:26.7] JR: No, no, no, sorry, let me clarify.
[0:27:28.2] MR: No, I'm with you Jordan, but let me just say for the skeptical listener saying, "I don't know if that is realistic." Let me just do two very short plugs. You look at, how does Jesus teach in the New Testament, how does He apply the truths of the Kingdom? He basically applies it in five different ways. He talks about nature a lot, the wind, the lilies of the field, etcetera. He talks about the body a lot.
Thirdly, He talks about food a lot. Fourthly, He talks about kind of just imaginative storytelling, but the fifth key way that He applies the truths of the kingdom is the workplace. This is all over the place, you want to know what it's like to follow Me and the cost of discipleship? Well, it's actually like a builder who sits down and counts the costs. What does it mean to bear fruit in the life of? It's actually like a vinedresser, your Father is like a vinedresser.
He goes along and He clips the buds off because He wants it to grow even more. Again and again, Jesus applies the truths of the kingdom to people’s work, they’re the specifics again, and then I won’t talk about this. I can start preaching but look at chapter three of Luke, John the Baptist. People are wondering what it means to repent, to follow God, to live a life of repentance.
[0:28:37.5] JR: Oh, one of my favorite passages, yes.
[0:28:39.8] MR: And what does he do? A tax collect – a group of tax collectors come, a group of soldiers come. When Luke tells us that it’s a bunch of people in the same profession wanting to know, “Do I need to leave my dirty profession to follow God?” and in each circumstance, John the Baptist first, he says, “Don’t leave it. You need to go back to tax collecting. You need to go back to soldiering.”
That’s the first thing, secondly, “Now, you’re going to do it different. It’s going to be counterculture. Now, you have to do it in a way that honors God. It is not going to be as lucrative because you can’t bribe people, you can’t bully people, you can’t overcharge their taxes.” But what does that do in the first-century world? Now, when you come up to a soldier and it had been a very scary thing or the tax collector knocks on your door and you hated seeing the tax collector.
But those people that have been down to the river to be baptized, whenever you meet those tax collectors and those soldiers, it’s actually a much different experience. They’re kind to you, they want to work with you, they’re not bullying you, you have a sense that they’re fair. Why does the gospel catch on in the first few centuries? It’s not only yes, it’s the work of the Holy Spirit but it’s God’s, transform people in the marketplace, and how do I know that’s true?
Because in that same book of Luke chapter three, later on in chapter 19, Luke tells another story. It is the only gospel that the story is in, and it's of a tax collector and it is Zacchaeus and he's met Jesus and he's experienced grace, and what is the first thing he says? He says, "I'm going to read now Torah and come to Tabernacle." No, he doesn't say that. He says, "If I've cheated anyone, I'll pay them back four times the amount that they did.
It’s people transformed in their everyday work and that is an incredible plausibility for the gospel in society and so I’m starting to preach here Jordan, you got to cut me off.
[0:30:25.3] JR: No, this is great.
[0:30:26.2] MR: This is just a call to pastors to say there's incredible potential, and this where I think the church needs to be focused.
[0:30:33.3] JR: Pastor, we talk a lot about Peter banding his fishnets. How much are we talking about Zacchaeus going back to his vocation? The most hated vocation of his day with Jesus’s blessing. Today’s salvation has come to himself as Zacchaeus goes back to his work, his deeply “secular work” they would have said at the time, man, and just to clarify, I’m not suggesting every pastor preach on the topic of work every week.
[0:30:59.2] MR: That’s right.
[0:30:59.8] JR: But in application to the workplace is just a preach, I think, is the model of Jesus Christ. Hey, so you read an early copy of The Sacredness of Secular Work. You know that the whole case of this book is yeah, listen, most Christians understand that their work has instrumental value, meaning, my work has value because I can write a check to my church or I can leverage my job to the instrumental end of sharing the gospel.
But I wrote the book to go beyond this, to hopefully move the faith in work conversation beyond this ethics and evangelism approach and to help believers see the intrinsic value of their work even when they’re not leveraging it to some instrumental end. Do you think those pastors understand the intrinsic value of work? I do, I think they’re just lacking the language to talk about it. What’s your read though? You have been in their chair leading the local congregation.
[0:31:52.2] MR: Listen, I think most pastors have all the tools and probably think this way at some level. I will say there are certain traditions that probably emphasize the goodness of material creation. After all, in Genesis, God calls it all good. So, we shouldn't only talk about the Spirit and the nonmaterial in a way that devalues that. Traditions that value the body I think tend to have a lot of the theology in place.
And those, not to pick on anyone but sort of a “it’s all going to burn” mentality, so why could this possibly matter, even if you hold that theological position you have to ignore like just a tremendous amount of things that Jesus and Paul and other writers in the New Testament would say. So, I would say a lot of pastors have the machinery in place and the theological tools to say, yeah, it’s every person who is a minister of the gospel.
[0:32:43.8] JR: Yeah, it’s good. It’s so interesting, people have been surprised to open up this new book and find so much about the new earth and the eternality of creation but to me, these ideas are inseparable. Dr. Daryl Colson, this theologian says, I’m going to not get the quote exactly right but it basically says the value of secular work depends upon the value of creation, right?
Which makes sense, right? Because in the secular world, we're dealing with material things like typing on Mac books made out of aluminum and planting gardens and changing diapers, whatever, and the value of creation, all right, so the value of secular work depends upon the value of creation. The value of creation depends upon its final destiny, which if you believe that God meant what He said in Genesis 1 that this material world is very good, it just doesn't pass the sniff test that He's going to obliterate that creation that He called very good.
And it also doesn’t stand up to scripture. Was this a challenge for you to work through or did you get this theology early in your career as a pastor?
[0:33:42.8] MR: Oh, I don’t know that I got it. I mean, I needed the help of some wise guides and certainly theologians in church history. There’s a couple of big ideas that I think helped me. Yeah, simply the teaching of the new heavens and the new earth that our ultimate destiny is not to go away to a disembodied heaven but actually, the final chapter of the story is heaven comes down to earth.
Jesus talks about the renewal of all things in Revelation, “I’m making all things new.” He doesn’t say, “I’m making all new things.” God says, “I’m making all things new” and just the sense of – yeah, and work in the new heavens and the new earth, Jesus gives some cues to our ultimate destiny will be one where we are contributing through work in the new heavens and the new earth and you see this in the book of Revelation.
Again, the nations are bringing their tribute, their cultural goods, or their artifacts, which now makes that case the goods that they're producing. Jesus in this – is it Mathew 25, the parable of the talents, He says, "Well done good and faithful servant. Enter your master's happiness." You've been faithful with a few things, I will put you in charge of many things.
You have been doing work now, now you’re going to be entering your Father’s glory. You are going to be doing many things that I am going to put you in charge of. So, there is this sense of ongoing stewardship, ongoing service, and ongoing work to the master. It’s not all going to be singing and gosh, some of the amazing singers in our world, they’ll probably continue singing in the new heavens and the new earth.
Maybe we’ll have redeemed voices but probably for many of us, we’re going to be doing work that glorifies the Father in heaven.
[0:35:13.7] JR: And Isiah 65, “All long enjoy the work of our hands.” Hey, speaking of your work to date, you are not a mere Christian as I define it, right? The opposite of a pastor or religious professional, somebody leading a “spiritual nonprofit” but you do share a challenge that I think pastors and mere Christians struggle with probably, right? That at least I do, this temptation to neglect the way of the Lord as we do the work of the Lord.
Skye was just back on the podcast a couple of weeks ago and I like the way he put it. It’s this idea of being so preoccupied with the mission of heaven that we neglect the methods of heaven, right? The methods of the kingdom. I’m curious where you’re most tempted to make that mistake of sacrificing the way of Jesus for the work of Jesus.
[0:35:59.9] MR: Some of your listeners will love the enneagram, some will hate them, some people have moved on but the reality is I’m probably an enneagram three, which means that in part, I’m a performer. I’m very conscious of my image and gosh, in our world where the way to get ahead in your work or your ministry is you’re just a constant marketing machine, not simply of your products but of your personal brand.
And when I look at the way of Jesus, He was not a good marketer. He was not a good self-promoter. You've got sort of the messianic secret in the gospel like, "Don't tell anyone I've been doing this" and of course, His reasons why He says that.
[0:36:41.7] JR: Don’t tell your friends.
[0:36:43.1] MR: Right, right, don’t tell your friends. Yeah, “Wait, what? I thought we want this really to spread Jesus?”
[0:36:47.7] JR: Clashing word of mouth at every instance He could.
[0:36:50.7] MR: Yeah, exactly. So, it's just a check on my spirit to say do excellent work, serve people, certainly, try to grow your message but be a little skeptical and at least self-reflective on the ways that you're promoting yourself because the way of the gospel is the way down, right? It's the way under. Even John the Baptist says, "I must become less, He must become greater." So, I haven't figured that one out, I think it will be with me for all my days that I need to keep pressing into that and to know it's more about His name than mine.
[0:37:24.4] JR: Is there anything practical you do or don’t do to help keep that in check? By the way, I struggle with this too. This is a very selfish question.
[0:37:30.7] MR: Yeah, I don’t know that it’s a particular practice. I think I just – in walking with God daily, I think it’s something that I keep before my mind and, to be honest, like just the simple daily practice of time with the Lord and prayer and in scripture even if that’s a little bit and having an eye towards your work that day. I was reading James Four the other day and it’s just this very simple statement about God opposes the proud.
He gives grace to the humble and I started immediately thinking of the different ways that in my work, I’ve had maybe an arrogant attitude or just I’ve been proud and just to humble myself and to say, “God, I need you and I pray that I would represent the humility of Christ in my work.” There is nothing like just the regular pull of scripture and God’s spirit to bring us back to how we’re supposed to be focused that day for our work.
[0:38:26.5] JR: Agree, agree. Hey Matt, three questions we end every episode with. Number one, which books do you find yourself gifting most frequently to others? Like if we pulled open your Amazon order history, what’s popping up over and over again?
[0:38:40.3] MR: Well, because of the nature of my work, working with a lot of churches, I give away a lot of copies of Matthew Kaemingk and Cory Willson’s, Work and Worship: Reconnecting Our Labor and Liturgy. This is a Baker Academic but it’s really edifying for any Christian, you know mere Christians like you and I but for pastors in particular, there’s so many great ideas, so much good theology, so much good Bible in there that’s going to help you get along the way in integrating these ideas.
[0:39:09.0] JR: It’s good. Who do you want to hear on this podcast talking about how the gospel influences the work they do in the world?
[0:39:14.2] MR: You know, I became friends with the guys over at Eventide Asset Management up in Boston, and the three founders, Robin John, Finny Kuruvilla, and Jason Myhre, any three of those guys would be amazing. Why I love it is because they’re thinking specifically in the financial sector, the asset management kind of fund development and investing world, how these ideas are being flushed out.
I’ve just found them to be some of the most thoughtful, specifically, I’m thinking through the biblical story. So, Finny, Robin, or Jason would be fantastic to have on the podcast.
[0:39:48.3] JR: It’s a good answer. All right, I always ask our guests to leave the mere Christians listening with one thing but I actually want you to talk to any pastors or church leaders who may be tuning in. Before we hang up, what do you want to reiterate to them?
[0:40:02.8] MR: I would just say you can make such a phenomenal impact on people’s lives in helping them to have a more holistic integrated life of following Jesus and welcoming Him into their days' work and would you just try it? Would you just try it this time tomorrow? Would you just try a commissioning prayer? Would you just reach out to someone in your congregation and ask to pray for them and their work and just see what happens?
And I think you’ll find that people surprise their joy and the joy that you have in being a minister of grace to them is really worth it. So, just don’t get paralyzed in having to do the perfect thing, start with something, and see what God does.
[0:40:42.5] JR: It’s good. Matt, brother, I want to commend you for the exceptional work you do every day for the glory of God and the good of others, for helping pastors equip the saints, the mere Christians in the pews to do the very work that God created us to do and thank you for getting practical with me today, and giving us the practical tools that mere Christians could pass on to their pastors.
Guys, you can learn about Made to Flourish at madetoflourish.org, get this free box that they ship out that’s awesome with a copy of Common Good Magazine. Matt, thanks for hanging out with us today.
[0:41:12.4] MR: Jordan, it’s been a pleasure to be with you today.
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[0:41:16.1] JR: I hope you guys found that episode to be terrifically helpful. Hey, if you’ve got a great guest recommendation for the show, I want to hear about it at jordanraynor.com. Thank you, guys, so much for tuning in, I’ll see you next week.
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