Dennis Tuuri

# Sermon Transcript

Today’s sermon is on work in human relations and we’re going to actually read from two texts. The first will be Genesis 1:26-28 and the second will be Ephesians 6:5-9. And in the sermon I’ll connect these and show how one flows from the other, hopefully. So first Genesis 1:26-28, please stand for the reading of God’s word.

Genesis 1, beginning at verse 26: Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, according to our likeness. Let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over the cattle and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth. So God created man in his own image. In the image of God he created him. Male and female he created them. Then God blessed them. And God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply. Fill the earth and subdue it. Have dominion over the fish of the seas, over the birds of the air, and over every living thing that moves on the earth.’”

And now moving to Ephesians 6 and beginning at verse 5, we’ll read through verse 9. Ephesians 6:5-9: “Bondservants, be obedient to those who are your masters according to the flesh with fear and trembling in sincerity of heart as to Christ. Not with eye service, as men pleasers, but as bondservants of Christ, doing the will of God from the heart, with good will, doing service as to the Lord and not to men, knowing that whatever good anyone does, he will receive the same from the Lord, whether he is a slave or free. And you masters do the same things to them, giving up threatenings, knowing that your own master also is in heaven and there is no partiality with him.”

Let’s pray. Father, we thank you for your scriptures. We thank you that they’re words of life to us. We thank you that your Holy Spirit speaks in the present through your word to us. Bless us, Lord God, to receive that communication. May the spirit within us minister your word to us, transform us, and show us the great significance of the relationships that we have in work—work in this church and in our families. In Jesus name we pray. Amen.

Please be seated.

Now, today is the Lord’s Day that’s closest to the anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision in 1973 legalizing abortion. We have in the past referred to this day at times as anti-abortion day of the Lord. Some groups refer to this now—some do it now. Sunday. They now have two Sundays as Sanctity of Human Life Sunday.

So what I’m going to try to do today is keep this wrapped in the context of this series on work. And we’ve come to a place in our consideration of work and looking at this side of the advent of Christ where we’re going to look at the full revelation of the Trinity of God, or at least talk about it a little bit as it’s spoken of in the Genesis account, and talk about the significance that means in terms of our work.

So we’ll look at the Genesis account and make a couple of points from it. One, that image bearing is a community event. Image bearing has relationship to our bearing the image of the triune God who exists in love and fellowship. And so in the creation account we see that same thing: male and female he created them.

Secondly, we’ll talk about image bearing and human dignity, what some call today human rights. And we’ll talk about the significance.

So the first point is the significance of love and the gospel and the revelation of that and the coming—the advent of Christ—showing love as the fundamental aspect of who God is and the significance of that for our work.

And in the second thing we’ll look at or draw out from the text is the notion that people have dignity because we’re all individuals as well as in our community relationships, created in the image of God. And so we’ll talk about that. We’ll talk about how that affects our work and what we do at our work.

And then the third thing we’ll talk about is specifically then how it works out—how we get some epistle meditation on the revelation of the triune God who is love and who calls us to be full image bearers. We’ll look at the epistle in Ephesians 6 and see some specific ways that those two truths I think are related to the workplace and our interactions in the context of the workplace and in all human community. Really, there are always these relationships in the family, in the church, in our neighborhood, in the state, et cetera. But the specific references to work are in Ephesians 6, and that’s our focus today as well.

Now, along the line about the middle of this sermon I’ll mention the implications of this, or the denial of these truths for what’s happening in our country and around the world in terms of abortion—the killing of infants in the womb. And while we’re not going to use the kind of liturgy we have in the past, we will today in the intercessory prayer pray imprecatorily as the psalm we just read and sang is asking for God to bring his particular judgments on those who strike out at the image of God in children in the womb, but also who strike out at the image of God and trying to break down or alter this relationship of mother and child.

So we’ll do that in the context of the pastoral prayer and we’re singing about it in some of the songs, but that really is an implication of these other truths. And we’ll talk about one reason why I think that might be happening today. And we’ll continue to petition the throne of God that abortions cease.

It’s interesting, by the way, to realize that in our country certainly—and I don’t know about other countries—but the statistics here show that abortions are decreasing in most population groups. And people think probably the biggest reason for that is the ultrasounds that many women look at and realize that there is life in their womb. It’s a real person in there.

And you know, really what we’ve been talking about in terms of this series on work, and again today, is that work is to create technology, and in today’s looking at today’s verses and getting a little bit ahead of myself, that increases love—the capacity of people to love, okay, and interact in a proper relationship with each other. That’s exactly what’s happened. Because of the work—we could say the Protestant work ethic—and the tremendous cultural advances that came from that, we now have cultural advances in the area of health care that have created or restored the love of mothers for their children that others outside of the family have attempted to strike at.

And so really the reason why some of our prayer—the way God is answering some of our prayers to stop abortion—is through technology, through vocation, through men and women serving in their vocations. And those vocations have led to increased love in the context of the human family.

So that’s where we’re going, and we’ll touch on abortion. But that’s, you know, I think it’s proper to put our prayers for the ceasing of abortion, God’s judgment on people to bring them to repentance and to flourishing in his love. I think it’s proper to set that in the overall context of what the day of the Lord is. And the day of the Lord is the advent of God—a demonstration of who he is.

And as we’ll see in today’s implied in today’s text and stated explicitly in the New Testament, God is love. And so all of this we put in that context.

Okay. So let’s talk first about the first point, which is image bearing, community, and love.

And this is a fairly simple point to make. To me it seems significant, and perhaps to you it just seems like something that you’ve thought about a great deal. But we normally look at Genesis—uh, the creation account in Genesis that we just read—and draw from it the implication that we are each individually imagebearers of God. And so the fight against abortion is a fight against people that strike at the image of God in the human person, and specifically in the human person in the womb. And that’s fine and good. And there’s, we’ll talk more about that in our second point.

But what I want you to notice here, you know, and I tried to emphasize in the reading, is what we are seeing in the image-bearing design of man by God as recorded in Genesis: our bearing of God’s image is in our likeness. Right? I just read that in the text and I tried to stress it: “Let us make man in our image according to our likeness.”

Now the triune God is demonstrated here and in other places in the Old Testament. But of course, the full flourishing, the full revelation, the full kind of statement that God is three in one—three persons existing in one godhead—comes fully with the advent of Jesus Christ and the giving of the new covenant portion of God’s word.

And it’s very significant for us. This side of the advent of Jesus, the Christian church has had tremendous knowledge of the triune nature of God. And this plurality of God is directly related in the text to him creating imagebearers, right? And then it goes on then to say that he creates man in his own image, in the image of God he created them—human community, human relationships, male and female.

So both with the plural statements of “our” and “us.” And then in the linking of the image-bearing design of man to community—to man and woman specifically—God tells us here, kind of puts right up front, that while in our kind of atomistic culture we think of this purely in individualistic terms, the image-bearing capacity that’s drawn in to put into man has to do with love. It has to do with relationships.

Right? What we’re seeing is the plurality, the triuneness of God. And so God is many things. God has many attributes. But we’re told, for instance, in 1 John chapter 4, specifically verses 8 and 9: “He who does not love does not know God, for God is love.” This is repeated several times in 1 John. God is love.

And so if we had, you know, kind of one attribute that John summed up to talk about who it is that we’re bearing the image of, it is love. Okay.

Now, you’ve heard—some of you have heard—and some of you have maybe listened to sermons by me and others, or read books on the seven deadly sins. A less popular topic is the seven lively virtues. But there are seven of those. And in Christian culture since the time of Aquinas, the medieval theologian, the church has talked about seven lively virtues.

Well, what Aquinas did, and why sometimes people don’t preach on it, is he took the four existing virtues that Greek philosophy said were ones that we were to exhibit in the context of our lives. These four being justice, courage, temperance, and prudence. And what Aquinas did then was to add three theological virtues. So these were four ethical virtues that really were Greek and didn’t have relationship to image bearing from God. Although it does, of course—they’re painting with the same pallet.

But Aquinas added the three distinctive Christian theological virtues of faith, hope, and love. And of course, we see this reflected in various texts of the New Testament, but probably the primary one is 1 Corinthians 13: Faith, hope, and love. And the one that abides is love. Because in the eschaton, we walk now not really by faith. Somehow it’s different. And we’re not hoping for that—we’ve entered into it. But the abiding virtue then is love, in community and relationship, for all eternity.

So anyway, the seven lively virtues added these three Christian virtues on. And these virtues, and specifically the virtue of love—the trinitarian nature of God—that God existed in all eternity in Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in a loving relationship to each other. Right? This completely changed Western culture. This was not the primary aspect or attribute that Greek culture developed or saw. But for Christian culture, it certainly is. This is absolutely a prime for Christian culture: that ultimate reality is not fundamentally impersonal as the Greeks saw things, but that ultimate reality is actually very personal and it’s communal—it’s community relationships, it’s people existing—the three persons of the Trinity in all eternity.

So what is created, right, is a reflection of who God is. And when we’re said to be made as the imagebearers of God—kind of the crown of creation—then clearly the significant aspect of that image bearing is this love that we’re to have for each other and the communities that we’re to exist in.

Now, salvation for the Greeks, like their doctrine of reality, was impersonal. Any idea of salvation was just, you enter into the realm of impersonality and, you know, staticness so to speak. But salvation in the Christian faith, of course, is highly personal. And what we see in salvation is a movement away from the inward-turning, the self-focused people that derive from the fall.

Salvation is being brought into a condition of love for one another. Right? That really is ultimately what the turning point of our lives is. That’s what salvation is in the Christian faith.

So this distinction from Greek philosophy absolutely changed Western culture, and actually Eastern culture as well. Human history has not been the same since the full revelation of the Trinity of God and the revelation, the full revelation, that man is restored to the image-bearing capacity as described in Genesis—to image the triune God in community together and in relationships.

A simple point, but a very profound point, right? Because it’s the only way we move away from the kind of selfishness that’s reflected in the fall of Adam and Eve, for instance, and reflected in our own fallen natures and in our sin patterns. Our sin patterns are selfish. Our sin patterns are unloving. Ultimately, sin is simply not being loving, defined by the way God describes his character and his lovingness.

Now, what does this have to do with work? Everything. It has everything to do with work because what it means is that our work is set in the context of those relationships. I mean, in the, I read three verses in Genesis because I wanted to show that both at the beginning and end of the creation of man in the image of God—in the triune image of God, in community and in loving relationships—the beginning and end of that is the tasks that man is to accomplish.

So we’re to have dominion. We’re to, you know, be the hands and fingers of God, feeding one another in love. And we’re to be the people that advance the culture—Calvinistic concept of what vocation is all about. We’re to grow things. We’re to beautify the world. We’re to create cultures. But what’s the purpose of those cultures? Is God’s primary intent the creation of culture and the beauty of all the cultural artifacts that we create, or is that related to the image bearing that we have in Christ?

And I’d say the latter is the case. The primary purpose is not simply the creation of cultural artifacts—as beautiful and as glorifying to God as that is—but these things, I think, have to be tied to who we are as imagebearers of God—to love, to relationship.

And so, as I said, and I’ll say it again, that the greatest way right now that the Lord God, in his providence, is fighting abortion is technology. That shouldn’t be surprising to us if we understand the implications of who we are in image bearing for God. Our work is given to enhance relationships, not just in the workplace, but what our work is to do is to enable people to love better, more maturely, more effectively. That’s what culture does. Culture provides that to people. So computers, text messaging, Facebook, whatever it is. Yes, lots of ways to use it sinfully. But ideally, that technology is being developed by God through his imagebearers to increase human relationships.

So this means that when you go to work tomorrow, or when you work in your home tomorrow, or when you work with your children tomorrow, or when children work with their parents tomorrow, in all of these contexts, the overarching concern of the whole thing is relationships—the relationships within the workplace and the relationships that are being furthered by the cultural mandate that God has given to us to advance culturally and society.

So it means everything to work—this fundamental truth—that our image bearing is an image bearing in community and it reflects the character of God. And the character of God can be summed up as love. Your vocation is all about love.

Now, we’ve talked about this before. But you know, people say, “Well, nobody at the end of their life says I wish I would have spent more time at the office. They always say I wish I would have spent more time with the people in my life.” And there’s some degree of truth to that, right?

But if what you do at the office—if what you do at the office tomorrow—has as its goal human flourishing, which means proper human love and relationships, and if your technology is going to advance that, and whatever you do—big job, small job, seemingly important job, seemingly unimportant job—is seen in the context of you being created for the purpose of enhancing and building love in community in the world. Well, then maybe you will spend more time at the office. I don’t want to take you away from your families. But do you understand the significance for work when we see that image bearing is tied directly to the image of God who is triune, and it’s tied directly to our goal, which is to love and to enhance love in the context of the world?

So when we put love at the center of our work, it really, hopefully, should change your approach to work, right? And now your work, no matter how mundane, when placed in that context, has tremendous meaning and purpose. And you can see where your image-bearing capacity is not somehow blunted through your work. Actually, it extends through your work to enhance the relationships, communities, and love of people in the context of the culture in which we live as well.

So image bearing, community, love—very important for what the scriptures tell us.

When we had yesterday at our community group leaders talk on biblical counseling training, the vision of this church was repeated—actually, not deliberately by Steve, the counselor that taught us—but when he was talking about the intercessory aspects of what we do in our community groups. It’s to increase people’s love for God. But that love for God is demonstrated in our love for people.

And the vision of our church is loving the triune God and our neighbor and transforming the fallen world.

Now, that’s a vision for our church. And everything we do is supposed to move toward that vision and build in the context of what that overall purpose is. And I would say that’s the same vision that you should have for your work, right? Whether you have a business or whether you go to work for somebody else, your thought about it is what you should be doing at work is an exercise of love for God, and you’re devoting your energy and your labor to loving your neighbor as yourself.

And in that way, we restore the image-bearing capacity of man. We transform the fallen world because the fallen world, in its basic nature, is selfish. It’s all about each of us individually. And so, you know, really, I know it sounds a little grandiose, but when you go to work tomorrow and stamp out a piece of equipment hour after hour, or sweep up a spot, or program a cell phone, whatever it is you do, you see, God has called you to do that as an image bearer of his. And you are actually transforming the fallen world in significant ways.

And specifically, because what you’re doing is enabling, enhancing the loving image-bearing capacity of man for his fellow man.

Okay. So loving God and our neighbor, transforming the fallen world. I think that is an implication of Genesis.

Now, Genesis also can be seen in terms of individual image-bearing capacity. Right? So what Genesis also tells us is not just that we bear God’s image in community, but it also means—and the Christian church has taught this—that every person is made in God’s image. So the text tells us male and female, but it also tells us that he created man in his own image. So it says that both individually and as we work in community, the image of God is reflected.

So what this means is that men have dignity. The term that’s used today is human rights. I’m not as comfortable with that term. I know some people are, and I’m not faulting them for it. But human dignity, human value, right?

And so, specifically, in terms of the prayers today, that abortion would diminish and come to a ceasing, it’s because that child in the womb is an imagebearer of God. Right? And the love of the child’s mother and parents should be restored as well. And that’s part of what technology is doing.

But in any event, people have individual dignity as imagebearers of God, and this is significant as well.

So, kind of an obvious point, I suppose, but when it comes to our work, what does it mean? Well, it means that whether you’re an employer or an employee, your relationships in the context of the workplace itself now are significant. And what you are called on to do is to treat one another with the kind of dignity and respect that someone made in the image of God has.

Now, again, this is totally unlike Greek culture. Greek philosophy talked that people had different values based upon abilities, innate abilities, training, whatever it was. And that some people just weren’t supposed to be free. They were just servants in their minds, and they were of lesser quality or value. Ultimately, you know, the word of God tells us that people have value in and of themselves.

Now, as we’ve moved away from that as a culture—as we become more and more post-Christian—people’s value is no longer related to their being created in the image of God. But their value has increasingly become, in our day and age, it seems to me at least, involved in commodification. So everything is turned into a bottom line, dollar and cents analysis, right?

Keller talks about this in his book Every Good Endeavor. And he says that when his wife took on a ministry job at a church, she was talking to one of the other pastors at the church, and she was talking about her contacts. And he said, “Well, you’re in church work now. You’re in ministry work now. These are not contacts. These are people.”

Okay? So, so, you know, that could be sort of, you know, a gotcha kind of moment that isn’t really fair. But on the other hand, think about it. When people who bear the image of God become, you know, eyes, wallets, resources, human resources, right, just the ability to make money for the firm or people that you can utilize their resources for your particular project—what’s slipping into our vocabulary and the way we look at things is the opposite of the kind of human dignity that we’re supposed to have.

People are getting back to the Greek way of thinking, as we reject Christianity, where people become commodities with varying degrees of value.

So the fact that we’re made in the image of God has tremendous significance for the workplace as well. You know, there are times when people have to be laid off or fired. It happens, and it’s really for the good. It’s really for the flourishing of people—to not continue ineffective businesses that are not really serving a need anymore, no longer enhancing the love of people in the greater culture. Some people have to get laid off. Some people have to get fired. They’re not the right fit.

How will all those things occur? How do they happen? What are the processes used when somebody has to be laid off or fired? Are there conversations? Or is it a blanket, terse dismissal statement that comes from some memo factory in the corporation? Or even in a small business, it just flies out of the office—a termination paper?

You see, that is an unchristian way to treat people.

And the same with when people decide to leave firms. Do you just blow off the firm you’ve worked for and say, “I’m moving on. See you. Check out. No.” Because you have respect for the other people that you work with—because they’re made in the image of God. And they’re not just resources that are used to accumulate your family wealth, for instance.

So the fact that we’re made in the image of God individually—that we have human dignity because we’re made as God’s imagebearers—has tremendous significance for work as well. Every person is made in the image of God, and as a result of that, we should give them the kind of dignity and respect that imagebearers of God are entitled to.

It’s very difficult sometimes. You go to a workplace. You sort of, here’s an example. When you go to the store, right, and you buy food, who’s the person you’re giving your credit card to at the register? It’s an imagebearer of God. And if all you do is think of them as a clerk, and I know that there’s efficiencies that we have to go through in life, but you know, I think it’s worthwhile this week—and particularly in your workplace, but in the other relationships you have—that when you see people, to think God’s image is reflected in that person, you know.

Some people don’t reflect it very well. But that’s who they are.

When you deal with interruptions in your work, right, or in the context of the worship service, that little guy or gal—I don’t know what it is—a little child crying, right? Image bearer of God. So it doesn’t mean you don’t, you know, deal with things and remove distractions sometimes. But it means the way we do it has to be informed by these first two aspects of who we are according to Genesis—what our work is all about.

And that is, we’re created as imagebearers of a loving God in relationship. And we’re created as imagebearers who respect the dignity of every other person that we have relationship with. And this should—

Okay, so the idea here is, what are we talking about this for? Because we’re talking about work, and we’re talking about the implications of the advent of Jesus, which we just celebrated, and the implications of it have been so overwhelmingly significant for the history of the world. It’s easy to take it for granted, and then it’s easy to sort of forget it as our post-Christian, but having a lot of the Christian, you know, touches to it, decorations to it, the context in which we live—it’s easy to slip away from these things and to slide back toward kind of a pagan perspective on people, relationships, or things to be used for our own benefit, et cetera.

So, so, number one, these two truths should give us tremendous praise, thanksgiving, and admiration for the God who revealed himself in this full way in the advent of Jesus Christ and in the giving of the Spirit. Tremendous praise to him for the way human culture has never been the same since, because of these two truths: love, dignity. And number two, it should cause us to want to re-energize ourselves to treat people with the kind of dignity and for the purposes of love that God has called us to as imagebearers of his.

So I think it’s quite significant, and in a way that kind of provides the context for looking at the text from Ephesians 6, which we’ll turn to now.

And this is Ephesians 6:5-9. You might want to open your Bibles at this point. There are some specifics to the text here that we want to talk about.

So in our work, we’re to value people. We’re to have as our goal and our practice love. And that would inform then what we do in the workplace. And I think Ephesians 6 sort of describes that to us.

But before we get there, one thing I wanted to make a point of here: as we move from human dignity as into more of a concept of human rights, I think one thing that’s happened in our culture to produce things like abortion is that human rights have so been emphasized that really human love and relationship and community has been deemphasized.

Okay? So we each have rights, and these are individual rights. They’re not seen in community anymore. So the mother has a right to do whatever she wants with her body, including her child. And so, you know, how do you have a culture that stresses human rights and yet allows for abortion? It’s because, I think, that the kind of human rights that we have without its linkage back to the image-bearing capacity of a God who exists in Trinity and relationships becomes more and more demanding of certain things for the individual. It’s really back to the fall of Adam and Eve. It’s really back to selfishness and the claims for the rights of particular people. And the end result of that is murder.

I don’t know anything about Duck Dynasty. I might have watched it once, years ago. But I almost never watch Sean Hannity. But I was so thrilled that Fox News was back on Dish Network, I actually watched five minutes of Sean Hannity—”Look, it’s back.” You may not know it was off for 30 days or something—contract dispute. But I was sort of amazed. They had this guy on, Phil, I guess his name is, from Duck Dynasty. And they were talking about the terrorist attacks in France.

And I thought, you know, what is God doing in America when he uses some strange-looking fellow from Duck Dynasty—whatever that means—to help school us on what’s happened in the last century as we’ve moved away from Jesus? He gave this nice little summation of history, and he said that there had been five movements: Nazism, Shintoism, communism, Islamofascism, and secularism. And in each of these movements, there’s no Jesus. And each of these movements want to kind of conquer the world. And each of these movements have produced tremendous numbers of murder.

So Nazism—no Jesus, wants to conquer the world—murders millions of people, right? Shintoism—no Jesus, wants to conquer the world. You know, lots of people murdered in World War II and other times. Communism, same thing. And those three are pretty well played out.

But now the ones we have going on is Islamofascism, which wants to conquer the world. No Jesus. What happens? Lots of people are being blown up and killed around the world, increasing numbers. And secularism. Well, how is it murdering people? Well, it’s abortion. So no Jesus, human rights gets perverted into some kind of radical, really, kind of whoever has the most power gets the most rights. And the child has no power in the womb, and the end result is murder.

No Jesus, murder. No Jesus, murders death.

He said, “I’m sticking with Jesus.” Well, that’s right.

And so the point here is that you can’t come up with abstract concepts of human rights, take them from the Christian culture, take them with no Jesus, and think everything’s going to be cool. It won’t be. It’ll devolve because of the sinful, individualistic nature of man.

Okay. So let’s move on quickly to Ephesians.

And the way this kind of practically works out in Ephesians 6. So, first of all, what Ephesians 6 describes as master-servant relationships—and we don’t want to get hung up about that. These were not like the same sort of slaves that we had in America at the colonial founding of the country. It wasn’t that kind of slavery. It was more like indentured servitude. I’m not arguing in favor of it. It is a condition that Paul wasn’t arguing in favor of. He was addressing a contemporary condition, and it is relevant for us.

God has put it into his scriptures because it describes work relationships. And now it doesn’t describe your work relationship, right? Your boss isn’t a master, and you’re not a servant in the sense that these terms were being used then in Greek culture. But these are like the worst-case scenario. If you’ve got that kind of relationship, the master should have the way he treats his employees changed as a result of the gospel. And Paul talks about that.

And in worst-case relationships, if you’re actually a servant, an indentured servant, to a master, your relationships should change with the restoration of who you are as an image bearer of God and with the goal of love.

Okay? So surely if a servant has to treat his master with that kind of respect, and a master has to treat his actual slave with similar respect and dignity, surely it works for us in our workplaces, right? And then the kind of relationships we have in the family and in the church and community as well. So it has relevance to us.

And what does it tell us? Well, it gives us a sequence of truths here that are significant for us.

“Bondservants, be obedient to those who are your masters according to the flesh with fear and trembling in sincerity of heart as to Christ, not with eye service as men pleasers, but as bondservants of Christ.”

And then the text goes on to talk about why, right?

“Doing the will of God from the heart with good will, doing service as to the Lord and not to men, knowing that whatever good anyone does, he will receive the same from the Lord whether he is a slave or free.”

All right, lots of stuff there. Let’s unpack it a little bit.

First of all, he tells them to obey. Okay, so right away, love doesn’t mean that somehow you’re released from doing the job that you were hired to do or are in a position to do. He says it several times. This is frequently overlooked in texts that deal with this in terms of work relationships in the Christian faith. But it’s true. He says over and over again, “Obey, obey, obey. Do the job. Do the job. Do the job.”

So do the job. Number one.

But then how you do this job is fundamentally different than if you’re not a Christian. Why? How so? Because you have a different—what Keller calls a different audience that you’re playing to. Number one, right? You’re doing this work for Jesus. So you’re not doing it as a man pleaser. You’re not doing good work just when the boss watches you. You’re not doing good work when you happen to catch the boss’s eye to make some brownie points, and then when he’s gone, you slack off. You’re doing this work for the purpose, for the motivation, of pleasing Jesus.

Okay. So number one, you’ve got what Keller calls a new audience for your work.

And so Paul is applying here this full-blown understanding of who we are as restored imagebearers of God in the workplace. And he says, you know, it’s very important that you obey your boss. But it’s very important that you do that—ultimately—that you’re obeying Jesus, that you’re working for Jesus ultimately.

Now, that could be, you know, that in and of itself. What does it mean to work for Jesus? Well, it means, if we remember Genesis, working in proper relationships, having the sort of deference for one another, et cetera, in the workplace that we give to imagebearers and working to enhance love through our work.

But he tells us some specific ways this has played out. He says, specifically, so he’s got this new idea of who we’re working with, and as a result of that, we’re supposed to serve with fear and trembling. So there’s supposed to be a sense of working in our workplaces as if we’re in the presence of God.

Okay. So it’s not some abstract thing. Jesus has his eye on you. When you go about doing your work, you do it as if you’re pleasing the King of Kings, the Lord of Lords, the Master of the Universe. You’re to do it with a great sense of respect for the person you’re serving, and some degree of trembling of not wanting to displease him, right? Not because he’s going to beat you. It’s not that kind of thing. He might, but it’s not because of that.

You know, if you had, think of the person you’re a hero—right? Some guy, some man or woman throughout created history that would be a hero to you. And have that person with you in the workplace, and you would want to do things really well. You’d want to please them, and you’d be, you know, kind of trembling that you don’t want to displease them by doing something stupid that they would see you do, right?

So that’s to be our attitude. Not only are we working for this other audience—that’s Jesus—but we’re also working in a way that would specifically, in our daily work, hour by hour, be pleasing to him and not displeasing to him. So we have a mindset that informs our work. And then we’re supposed to work with sincerity of heart.

So the word here means singleness of heart, right? You’ve got one goal for your heart. What is it? To be an imagebearer of him, to please him in your workplace.

And now all this is set as the way you’re supposed to be interacting with your boss at work, right? Bondservants, obey your masters. And then he gives all these characteristics of what that obedience looks like. The master is sitting in for Jesus, as it were, right? And so we have this different attitude. We have a different audience. And as a result of that, we have a singleness of heart as to Jesus Christ, as to Christ.

“Not with eye service, as men pleasers, but as bondservants of Christ, doing the will of God from the heart.”

What’s the will of God? Well, it’s the task you’re called to do, and it’s putting it in the context of showing respect to your fellow workers, to your bosses, to the firm. And it’s doing things because you know that ultimately, the task you’re called to do is building and enhancing human love, image-bearing communities of God through what you’re being called to do.

So that’s what you’re supposed to be doing—doing the will of God from your heart.

So you know, as Christians, we have transformed hearts. At the center of our being, our heart—another time here, it’s called our soul—from the center of who we are, we’re to be doing these things that we’ve talked about.

Paul is saying, essentially, “Fill in here who you are as an imagebearer of God and the goal to which that image bearing leads, which is human flourishing and love.”

“With good will doing service as to the Lord and not to men, knowing that whatever good anyone does he’ll receive the same from the Lord.”

So when we do this kind of work, we’re to do it joyously, with goodwill. We’re to do it cheerfully, right? We’re to do this. Why? Well, how could we do it any other way when we keep in mind the things that he’s told us to keep in mind—that Jesus is with us in the workplace? We’re to be pleasing him. And the way we please him is by successfully bearing his image as we’ve described it from the Genesis account of our creation. And the end result of that is that we’re to do our work joyfully before him.

And then finally, he says the great motivation for this is that there’s a reward that is coming. Now, you get your paycheck. That’s fine. But imagine if this text was true—that when you go about your work tomorrow, you do it in such a way as to anticipate that the guy who is the great giver of gifts, who’s the master of the universe, who has all resources, right, and has tremendous love for you—imagine that he’s going to reward you for your efforts tomorrow.

Imagine if that verse was true. Would it change our work? I think it would. It’d change my work. Well, it is true.

And Paul says, that’s what’s going on. That’s what your work is. You’ve been restored to your original creation in Christ. You’ve been saved from your selfishness. You’ve been saved from your lack of love. You’ve been saved from treating people as if they were objects or commodities. You’ve been saved from all of that. And so your relationship to your boss at work has changed, and it’s changed in a way that will produce great rewards for you.

And so why wouldn’t we serve Jesus in that way now?

Interestingly, he doesn’t just stop there with the workers, and he goes on to say to masters. And this is just an astonishing comment. And you masters, do the same things to them. Now, we don’t get the impact of that. But if you were living in the world at that time, masters were masters, okay? They weren’t slaves. They weren’t servants. They looked down on those people. They had nothing in common with those servants, okay? Their identity was tied to their position at work—we would say—of being a master. And they were able to—they would beat their servants. They would sexually threaten and assault them. They would send away their wives or their husbands. I mean, they had full control like that.

Okay. And what is he telling here—masters who are masters and who have been saved by Jesus Christ from selfishness and a lack of love? He’s telling him to treat your servants the same way I just told him to treat you. Right? I mean, think of the astonishment that would bring to a reader of this text at the time in which it was written. “I’m supposed to have love for my servant? I’m supposed to treat them with the kind of dignity and respect that you just told them to treat me? I’m to have that same kind of singleness of heart, serving you, and as a result of that, you know, being in good relationship to those who report to me?”

Yeah, it was an astonishing comment for Paul to make. But that’s what he says.

“You masters do the same things to them, giving up threatenings, knowing that your own master also is in heaven and there is no partiality with him.”

He says, “Give up threatening.”

In that one phrase, see—he says radically change the way you manage employees. And for many people today, many Christians today, if we understand the full sense of who we are as imagebearers of God and that Jesus is with us in the workplace, we will find different ways to motivate people than the ways we use now, which are frequently the ways of the world—the ways of compulsion, the ways of guilt, the ways of threatening, the ways of coercion, heavy-handedness.

This is common in workplaces, right? And the only reason it’s not as common in our workplaces in America is because the Christian world understood these texts and men and women created workplaces that reflected the reality of our image-bearing dignity and our image-bearing capacity to enhance love in the context of the world.

So masters are called to have an equal amount of respect for the ones that they supervise. They’re called to have the same attitude. They’re doing the work for Jesus—a different audience. And they’re called to establish new ways of treating the ones that report to them, as opposed to the old fallen ways of the world.

And then he reminds them that you also have a master. “You see, do this because you’re a servant, too. You’re a bondservant like they are. There’s a chain here of responsibility. But understand that you also have a master in heaven, and that master is Jesus. Do you want him to look at the way he treats you, and then treat your employees in that way?”

Now, sometimes that’s the problem: because masters don’t understand the love and grace and tremendous blessing that Jesus has done for them. So they need to hear the gospel. If you’re going, if you don’t know the gospel as it relates to you and how God is treating you, it’s hard to treat others in that same way. But that’s what we’re to do.

We’re to understand—employers are to understand—you have a master also in heaven. There’s a master. No partiality with him. Because, again, that’s what it reminds us of. There’s no partiality. All men are created in the image of God, and they’re created in the image of God to reflect. And so they’re given dignity and the kind of esteem that we give to them as being representatives, imagebearers of God.

And they’re given—so that your relationships with each other, whether you’re masters and servants, husbands and wives, children and parents, partners, whatever the relationship is, pastors and congregants, whatever it is—that in all these relationships, it reflects the image-bearing triuness of God.

God is not partial to persons. God has created each of us in these relationships that mirror the Trinity. And that triune relationship is the goal for our work itself.

May the Lord God grant us tomorrow as we go to our work—whether it’s in the home, in the school, in the church, in the marketplace—may he grant us a sense of the right audience so that we’re not working to please men, we’re not working to please ourselves. We’re not having our sense of joy in our work determined by how well somebody else compliments me for my work or not, right? We have the audience of Jesus Christ, and we know that as we go about doing our work for him, respecting the people we work with, yay, beyond that, loving the people we work with and seeing the product of our work as the enhancement of human love in the culture.

May the Lord God remind us also that he will reward our work. You don’t need the rewards from men. Oh, it’s good to have them. I like to get compliments. Who doesn’t? It’s good to give compliments. That’s a way to encourage people. But ultimately, our audience—repeated over and over again here to the servants and then to the masters in the same way—our audience is the Lord Jesus Christ. He is the one who has already accepted our work. We don’t have to overwork, and we won’t slack off in our work if we remember him as our audience and not the eyes of men.

Let’s pray.

Lord God, we thank you for our creation. We thank you for the way that’s reflected in who we are. We thank you for being saved back to that calling, and we thank you for the tremendous implications of this for our work. Bless us this week, Lord God. Help us to remember that the goal of all this is image bearing of the triune love that you—the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit—have had from all eternity. That you created the world for this purpose, to reflect that love and relationship.

Bless us then, Lord God, as we go about our work to that end. In Jesus name we pray. Amen.