Hands.

Hands folded, twiddling the thumbs. Not a positive picture, is it?

Last week, we focused on the freedom to offer our hands to God in prayer and praise. I hope you had a chance to experiment over the last week, and I hope today you’ll continue to feel freedom to offer your hands to God in prayer and praise throughout the service.

Today, we want to look at a different way of offering our hands to God. How do we offer the work of our hands, the work that we do, to God?

It’s a challenge, because we’re all in such different places.

This passage we just heard is for people who need a little bit of a kick. Proverbs tells truth about life: if we don’t put in effort, if we don’t work hard, we’re going to suffer.

Some of us need that little kick. We need to be reminded that part of serving God is being diligent, hard workers.

Some of us are at the other extreme, and our entire focus is work. Workaholics are sitting next to you even as we speak. Don’t look!

Actually, the truth is that most of the workaholics are at the office or checking e-mail right now.

Others work only for the rewards it brings; their real focus is the money, the lifestyle, the reward.

The other thing that adds to the complexity of this issue is that the work of our hands is much broader than just the work we do at a job. Those who are retired still have skills and energy and wisdom to contribute to the world as the work of your hands, as do those without a job, as do those who stay home with their children. All of us have work, a calling, something to contribute to the world. How do we offer that to God?

Would you be willing to pray a prayer silently right now?

“God, make it clear to me today what I need to do to better offer my hands to you in my work.”

 

 

 

When I think of working hard, I think of my grandpa.

He lived as if he were trying to make his life a living example of so much of the book of Proverbs. [READ Prov. 6: 10-11, 10:4; 12:24, CEV]

As a kid, I remember being at my grandparent’s house and finding it a little weird that I got to stay up later than my grandpa! He always went to bed early, because he was up at 4:30 every day, heading out early to his job as a mail carrier.

Like so many people who lived through the depression, he knew the importance of hard work. He LIVED the post office motto: “Neither rain, nor snow, nor sleet, nor hail shall keep the postmen from their appointed rounds.”

The only sick days my grandpa ever took in 30 years with the postal service were when his appendix burst and he had to be in the hospital. When he retired, he had so much accrued sick leave that he could retire a year ahead of schedule! He got this pin, honoring his 2500 days of sick leave accrued…and my grandma wrote on it with pride, “actually, it was over 2800 days”! [Show it]

He loved his job, delivering mail on foot to residents near the Rose Garden in San Jose, California. And the people he brought mail to every day loved him. They gave him presents at Christmas! When he retired, he got dozens of cards and gifts, with amazing things written inside. [Show book and read some]

How many of you have ever given something to your mail carrier? I didn’t think so!

When I think of offering my hands to God in prayer, he’s one of the images that comes to mind.

Working hard, even sacrificially hard. Enjoying what you do. Making a difference in people’s lives, no matter what it is that you work at.

Here’s what’s weird: that’s not a common image to strive for in our world anymore. We’re sort of intrigued with slackers. We tend to get annoyed with people who enjoy their jobs. It’s almost a requirement in a social gathering to talk about how hard work is, how much you don’t really like it.

If someone does an assignment and does it well, we often think of them as a brown-noser, or someone simply trying to impress the boss. Have you noticed this?

And, some of the places we work actually reward you for NOT working hard.

I’ve mentioned before that I worked for UPS for a few months in college, working early in the morning, loading the trucks for delivery.

Worst job I’ve ever had in my life. I have no idea what it’s like now, but the whole culture of the place then made no sense.

I started out loading three trucks. There was a big conveyor belt in the middle, and as the packages came down, us loaders would learn which addresses belonged on our trucks We’d put a routing number on it, and load it in the appropriate place on the appropriate truck.

At first, when I was learning, I had all kinds of “blow-bys”. Those were the packages that I SHOULD have picked up and loaded on my truck, but I missed them. They blew past me, and the loader right below me would pull them off the belt and pile them on the ground. At first, that pile was huge and daunting.

But I got better. I mean, I had a reputation to live up to! My grandpa was a mail carrier! Over time, I got better and better. The “blow-by” pile became miniscule. I had time to banter and joke with the other loaders. I got confident and proud of how fast I could work.

Then my manager came to me.

He began by puffing up my pride. “You’re a great worker! We love what you’re doing! You’ve picked it up faster than most!” Blah, blah, blah. I felt my chest swelling and my head getting bigger. Then the bombshell.

“You’re doing such a great job, we want to add a fourth truck to your responsibilities. You’re good enough to load 4 trucks!”

I smiled…and then stopped. My brain started piecing this together.

“Wait a minute,” I said. “Jason over there is only loading two trucks. You want him to load two, and me to load four?”

“Well, Jason’s slower. That’s all he can do.”

At that moment Jason popped out of his truck, caught my eye, and grinned, without my manager noticing a thing.

And I realized Jason had figured UPS out.

Why work hard? He did enough to get by, got the same paycheck I did. When they needed to add another truck, they wouldn’t give it to him-they’d give it to me!

The incentive was to be a little bit lazy!

I’m sure many of you can think of examples in places you’ve worked, examples of subtle and not so subtle encouragement not to work hard, not to excel, not to exceed.

The truth is, there are some parts of our culture that don’t live up to Proverbs. Working hard isn’t always rewarded. If hard work is only done for its external rewards, we’ll get frustrated because life doesn’t always work that way.

In a world where there’s a lottery and where IPO’s can skyrocket in value simply on promise, we aren’t always rewarded for hard work.

So that’s part of why our culture doesn’t really value people like my grandpa as highly as it used to.

Some of us, and some of the places we serve and work, could stand to learn from Proverbs and my grandpa. There’s value in working hard, in sacrificing, in loving what you do. Some need to learn the value of hard work, even if the rewards for it aren’t there.

But then there’s the other side of the coin. Some of us struggle with finding our value only in what we do. We ARE rewarded for our hard work, for what our hands can accomplish. It’s so important to us, that we become addicted to what we do, unable to stop or find balance. Some of us struggle not with laziness, but in being a workaholic.

I wouldn’t say I fit that image perfectly.

I’m a weird mix. I’m not a “Type A” person. I’m not driven, and people don’t tend to make remarks about how hard of a worker I am. I like to think of myself as relaxed.

But when I look a little deeper, I see internal battles I face of needing to “perform,” needing to work hard to find value and acceptance.

A year and a half ago, I had the privilege of going to the coast for a week in January to the Center for Personal Growth in Christ. It was a week to unwind and be in God’s presence.

I was surprised to find that it took me 3 full days to unwind and relax!

I think the key to offering our hands to God is NOT found simply in the amount of work we do.

It’s not just making sure we work more, or work less, or about getting the hours of work just right.

I think the key is in our purpose or our motivation for doing work. To find that in the bible, we need to move out of Proverbs and to Colossians.

Would you pull out your worship folder, and join me in reading Col. 3: 16-17? This gets us closer to the key of offering the work of our hands to God. [READ]

Why are we doing what we’re doing, and who are we doing it for?

In some ways, this is so simple, it feels a little silly saying it. Whatever we do, do it for God, not people. Be diligent at it. Do the right things for the right reasons, and you might even find some joy in that!

But everything I’ve said so far reminds us why it isn’t silly to say something this simple.

Some of us do what we do (and remember, I’m not just talking about what we do for work, but anything we give our time and energy and talents to)…Some of us do what we do for the rewards it gets us and for the approval of other people.

We make those great pies for the oohs and aaahs others give us. We become a lawyer because that’s what Dad really wants us to do. We coach the baseball team because people praise us for giving to kids.

Anytime we do what we do for other people, we run the risk of having the tables turned on us. The boss may give you another truck to load, and that’s the only way you’ll win his approval. Somebody else might bake a better tasting pie. You may coach a team that can’t win a game if their lives depended on it.

If we can discover how to do what we do for God, it opens new avenues of thought.

We want to do it well, even if nobody else notices or cares, because we’re doing it for the God who sees everything done in secret.

When we get a right view of God, this is also incredibly freeing. We don’t have to win God’s approval! He isn’t constantly raising the bar of performance for us, waiting to love us until we make it over some ever-unreachable threshold.

He loves us! He invites us to join what he’s doing in the world, and to let our part, the work of our hands, gain significance by being a part of the infinite significance of what God is doing in the world.

Imagine the typical playground scene, where there’s the kid who is always picked last for the team because he or she is so uncoordinated. Picture the team captain, instead, choosing the last kid first, and with a big smile, saying to the last kid: “Hey, I don’t care how you do. I just really want to hang out with you and have you on my team!”

Don’t you think that kid would probably try harder, and perform better, than ever before, knowing she’s loved and wanted and accepted?

That’s the picture of giving our all for God who loves us, instead of for people who are so fickle.

Another avenue this line of thinking opens is fairly obvious: Am I using what I have for God? Are my gifts and talents being used for the things God wants?

What might change, if you asked God what he’d like you to do with the things you love to do?

It’s really pretty simple. Are you and I doing the right things for the right reasons? Offering the work of our hands to God means doing what God wants us to do, and doing it for God, not the approval or rewards of others.

In our time of open worship, think about and listen for the way God is answering the prayer we prayed earlier:

“God, make it clear to me today what I need to do to better offer my hands to you in my work.”