How to Empower People Through the Workplace
Tom Shrader continues his series on biblical power by examining how followers of Christ should approach the workplace. Using passages from Luke 12, 16, and 18, he argues that eternal perspective must transform business practices, moving beyond short-term profit to long-term kingdom impact. He challenges business owners and managers to empower employees through fair compensation, meaningful work, and recognition, viewing the workplace as ministry rather than merely profit generation.
“You cannot segment your faith. You must integrate your faith across the board.”
— Tom Shrader
Series: Power Broker
Recorded: May 25, 2006
Duration: 41 min
Themes: workplace, power, authority, leadership, stewardship, ministry, service, empowerment, business owner, manager, workplace leader, employee, struggling with work purpose, new to management, seeking workplace ministry, balancing profit and faith
Scripture: Luke 18:18-27, Luke 16:19-31, Luke 12:16-34
Theological Themes: biblical authority, kingdom perspective, stewardship theology, ministry calling, servant leadership, eternal perspective, biblical workplace, empowerment ministry
Full Transcript
Session Eight: Power in the Workplace
Today is session eight of a ten-session series about power. Every week we've done a summary, so let's not break that pattern. It's important to make sure we're on the same page.
When we talk about power, we're talking about using power supernaturally—from a supernatural perspective. Humanly, here's how we see power: get power, grab power, use power, and all the people, places, and things around you become a source of power. You suck them dry, and then they're disposable.
God says no, that's not how power works. Power works this way: first of all, God's the source of all power. He gives power to you to use and to pass on. We see this in four areas: in government, in the workplace, in family, and the church. For example, in the family, God provides power to mom and dad so that they can empower the kids, so the kids now move out, and we just duplicate or replicate that process again and again. Same thing in church—God provides power and authority to the elders, the elders to empower the church. Same thing in the workplace.
Our premise in this series has been exactly that: power—in fact, the subtitle really gives it to you—power: get it, use it, and give it away. That's the whole idea.
The P.O.W.E.R. Framework
Here's the outline we've followed in this series. We did an introduction, and then we spent five weeks talking about power using that word as an acronym.
The first thing we talked about was proficiency—right person, right place. I had a great example of this in my own life this week. Susan and I were gone from Thursday right after PL, went up to Flagstaff, and came back Monday. We just had a great time. It's been a pretty tough year and a half for me. I'm a big vacation guy and time-off guy, and you all know we normally take five or six weeks in August. Last year we took four days, and once I was back, I said if I'm here, I'm going to work. So we've been going at it pretty hard with a lot of things coming up.
We were able to get away, but the minute we got back, we're right back into it again. Tuesday morning, I'm in a meeting really early, and my day is probably like yours. I'm in a meeting at 8, then at 9, at 10, at 11, went into a meeting at 12:30, and got out that afternoon at 5:30. All day I kept saying, "There's something I'm supposed to do today. There's something." I get home, and Susan said, "Okay, now you're teaching tonight, right?" And I said, "That's it. That's what I'm doing—I'm teaching tonight."
I was teaching our 20-somethings, and I walk into that room and got on the platform, and it was like I was on fire. It was like I just tingled from head to toe. I'm in the process of teaching, and I'm thinking, "I'm made for this. This is what I'm made to do." That's what I mean by proficiency. Even when I'm tired, even when I'm exhausted, all of a sudden when I'm doing what God's wired me to do, there's a shot of adrenaline—really a shot of the Holy Spirit who has gifted you and prepared you to do what He's uniquely gifted and qualified you to do.
Understanding Ownership
Ownership is really simple. Ownership is this: God has transferred possession of assets to you on a temporary basis. Though He relinquishes possession, He doesn't relinquish control or authority of them, or ownership.
If you think that through, the idea of paying God back becomes silly, because all you could pay Him back with is His own stuff. You could never pay Him back. If you gave Him everything you have—all of your resources, assets, time, energy, effort, and money—if you gave it all back to Him, you wouldn't be paying Him back. All you'd be doing is giving Him what's already His. He doesn't look for you to pay Him back. He looks for you to steward or manage those assets.
The Importance of Meaningful Work
W was work. Here's what we said about work: there has to be something meaningful to that assignment. It's not that it is in and of itself equal to the cure for cancer, but I understand where I fit. Even if my job is small, I understand that it's essential to what's going on.
A few years ago, Chuck Colson wrote a book titled Why America Doesn't Work. In it, he writes this: "If you want to utterly crush a man," said the great Russian novelist Dostoevsky in The House of the Dead, "just give him work of a completely senseless, irrational nature." Dostoevsky, who himself spent 10 years in prison, wrote, "If he had to move a heap of earth from one place to another and back again, I believe the convict would hang himself, preferring rather to die than endure such humiliation, shame, and torture. Deprived of meaningful work, men and women lose their reason for existence. They go stark raving mad."
I need to understand where I fit.
The Power of Encouragement
E—encouragement. You have to have it. It energizes people. We're not talking about blowing smoke at them. I was talking to a group of guys the other day, and I said, "You're the most de-energizing group I've ever seen. All you do is criticize. All you do is look for any flaw, and you go right
to the flaw. 99% of the things are going great, and you're focused on this thing right here. That catches all your attention. If you want to de-energize people, just hold back your encouragement.
There's the old tongue. Rather than use it to encourage, use it to discourage. You're dumb. You're stupid. You'll never be anything. You can't do anything right. If you can't do it right, don't do it at all. You watch how you crush the spirit of that child or that worker or that staff person or that government employee.
Then the last one is release. I can do all the others. If I'm dealing with my kid, and I've got him right person, right place, I convinced him of stewardship, I've got him in a meaningful assignment, he's all encouraged. If you don't let him go, then you're always holding them back, and you're depriving them of their power. You're not empowering them.
The Importance of Release
Listen, we knew from the very beginning. I went home yesterday, and Braden was there. That's our grandson. Braden turned six months today. His latest thing is he loves to spit. He's really good at this. He's kind of figured out that his hand is somehow a part of him, but he's not exactly sure what to do with it yet. That's kind of fun to watch him.
Here's what I learned. I never understood this grandparent thing where you pamper the kids and then they go home. I never understood it. Here's what I understand. The minute he has anything in him that's other than joy, I go, "Haley, he's yours." I didn't take care of you when you cried. I'm not going to waste my time on this kid when he's crying. Go feed him, or whatever it is you do with him, get him out of here.
I said, "Haley, he's almost six months." She said, "Oh, dad, he's growing up so fast." I could see in her those natural instincts: "Oh, he's my little boy." He is. He is the boy that God gave you to raise to be independent of you and totally dependent upon God. If you don't release him, it's cute that he's hugging on to you when he's six months. If he's still hanging on to you when he's 26, we got issues.
Moving from Theory to Application
We take all of those things and we say, "Okay, now, how do they flesh themselves out?" That first six weeks, in a sense, was theory. Now we move into application. We got the toughest one out of the way, right? Government. That's a hard thing for us. Today really may be the second most difficult, and that is we're going to talk about work and the workplace.
Now the lesson is for all of you. This really applies to those of you who would say you are a business owner or you are in management. If you are a business owner or in management, you can employ these principles immediately. The rest of you may say, "You know what, doesn't directly apply to me." It may not in and of itself, but I'll tell you what it will do. It will help you understand the world around you.
Those of you, especially those of you who no longer work because you are finished, you're retired in that sense, you're done with working for money, people are still coming to you for insight and counsel and you can share this with them. So here we go.
The Mission of the Workplace
The mission of the workplace, here it is, simple: To empower people to meet the needs of others through the investment of their professional lives. Let me start to fill in that. To empower people—that is to empower employees—to meet the needs of others. That would be like customers. Through the investment of their personal and professional lives. It's to empower people and empower the people around you.
So often in a workplace, here's what happens: I become very possessive and defensive. I remember when the computers were really starting to explode and we were trying to figure out how do they work and what can they do? I had a friend who was working for a guy. Here's how you know you're in trouble. He goes and interviews for this guy. The guy offers him the job and says, "I want you to understand something. I'm very, very, very difficult to work for." If the guy himself is telling you that, he is a jerk. He knows it.
So my buddy gets in there and introduces some computers into the whole business and pretty soon he's saying, "I've got really good job security because nobody else in here cares about this or wants to know about it." Which is so often true, especially in smaller companies.
But one day he went to the owner and he said, "You need to understand this computer stuff." The owner said, "I don't want to know." And he said, "You need to know. You need to understand what this can do." He dumped into the owner. He said, "You don't need to know how to run it or program it or any of that, but you need to know this." At the end of the day and a half, that owner said to him for the very first time, "I really understand what you're doing, and I see that what you're doing is virtually indispensable to this company."
It's really strange. He wasn't giving away his job security. All of a sudden the guy understood it and this guy now is empowering him and saying, "We need to do more of this." Great example.
The Purpose of Business
What's the purpose of business? Well, the purpose of business is really simple. It's not difficult to understand. It's not complex. It's basic. It's economics 101. Business exists for one reason. What is it? To make money. Well, I thought this was a Bible study. We'll get to the godly part of this in a second. But here we go. This is why you're in business: To make money.
If I'm in business, the bottom line in and of itself as just pure business, if I go to Wharton or Harvard or any other, the purpose of business is this: to make money. Now, that's a short-term view. I would suggest to you there's a long-term view. If I take the long-term view, my experience, the short-term view takes care of itself. Now, if we're going to talk long-term,
We have to talk about our faith in Christ. I want to invite you to open your Bibles to the Gospel of Luke. I want to look at three passages, and I want you to see the importance of long-term. In a sense, we're hitting the pause button here in our study. We're going to retool, redirect this a little bit, and then bring that long-term back to the short-term. We're going to look at Luke chapter 18, then Luke chapter 16, and then Luke chapter 12.
The Rich Ruler's Question
Luke chapter 18, verse 18 will set the groundwork for this long-term view. There is this certain ruler who comes to Jesus, and he says, "Good teacher, what should I do to inherit eternal life?" And Jesus said to him, "Why do you call me good? No one is good except God alone."
Let me just stop for a second. This is really important. Jesus, by the way, then goes on and answers the question. He's not looking for input from God. He's not looking for input or dialogue or discussion or debate. He said, "Listen, you come to me and call me good. I want you to understand something. The way you define good, as it relates to me, is that good equals God." So the question is, what do I do to inherit eternal life? And I'm now at the source that I really want to be at to answer this question. See what I'm saying?
In other words, you could have all sorts of questions. Let's say you want to talk about nuclear energy. And you could say, "Tom, give us your view of this." My view isn't worth much. I mean, I've got my opinions about it. I would just build these plants all over and just have a bunch of power and stuff. But if you said, "How would you build one?" I'd say, "You know, I don't know." "No, we want to know how you'd build it." Well, if I'm standing there next to a man who's devoted his life, or a woman who's devoted her life to the understanding of building an operation of these, we can both give you our opinions. But I'll tell you up front, you've got to listen to him. You've got to listen to her.
If you want to talk about farming, you can put me in a truck, and we can go out into the agricultural areas. You can talk to me, or a guy that's farmed forever. And I can give you my opinion, but I wouldn't listen to me. You want to talk about golf? I mean, I can stand there with Tiger, and I could dialogue about golf. But probably, if I was you, I'd listen to him.
If I want to talk about, "What do I do to inherit eternal life?" I can go to Starbucks and talk to a bunch of people. But if all of a sudden, I come across one of these guys, and He said, "Oh, I'm God," I'd listen to Him. I wouldn't care about the other guys. Because if I'm really hearing from God, and I'm asking, "How do I get to You? How do I inherit eternal life? How do I get to heaven?" I want to know from Him. If God's spoken, then I want His answer to this question. See that? This is really important. Because everybody's got a view on this. Everybody's a theologian, in the sense that everybody's got some answer. Whether they say, "Oh, you die, and you're earth, you know, you feed the worms, you're worm food," or they say, "Be good," or whatever it is. But if God's really spoken, then I want to hear this.
Jesus Exposes the Man's True Heart
So here's what He says: "You know the commandments: don't commit adultery, murder, steal, bear false witness on your father or mother." The man says, verse 21, Luke 18, "All of these I've kept from my youth." Now, this is an interesting situation. Jesus is saying, keep the commandments, and this guy says, "No problem. Put me down for yes. I've done all that."
Jesus said, "Really? Okay, well, one more thing, then. You still lack something. Sell all that you possess, give it to the poor, and you shall have treasure in heaven. Come and follow me." Verse 23: "When the man heard these things, he became very sad." So we see two things from him. Number one, he's very sad. Why is he very sad? He is extremely rich.
And then Jesus talks about how hard it is for those who are rich and wealthy to enter the kingdom of God. "It's easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God." And we've tried to explain that away. "The eye of the needle is really a gate, and a camel can crouch down and get..." No, no, no. Here's a needle, here's a camel. It ain't going to fit. That's what He's saying.
That's why, verse 26, when they heard this, they said, "Then who can be saved?" And He said, "The things that are impossible with man are possible with God."
Understanding Jesus's True Message
Now, here's what Jesus is not saying. Jesus is not saying you can earn your salvation. He's saying exactly the opposite. This guy says, "I've kept all these commandments." Jesus said, "Really, all of them?" "Yes, yes, yes, got them all." He said, "Well, the first one is, let's not have any false gods, no God but me. So you sell everything." He said, "Well, I'm not going to sell anything." "Why?" "Well, because I'm rich. That's my God."
Jesus is saying, you didn't keep ten, you didn't even get by one. Jesus is not teaching salvation by philanthropy. He's not teaching that I have this stuff, and as long as I have this stuff, I am not saved, so I give it to you, and you give it to him, and we pass it, and God willing, we won't have it in our possession when we die. No, all He's doing is pointing out that humanly, you can't save yourself. It's an act of God. God saves you. I'm a follower of Christ. How'd you get there? God put you there.
The Rich Man and Lazarus
Look at chapter 16. There's kind of a little fleshing out of this that's pretty interesting. Jesus is telling a story of a certain rich man, Luke 16:19. He's a rich man, habitually dressed in purple, fine linens. There's a poor man. His name is Lazarus. Lazarus is hanging around. He would love just to have the crumbs from this man.
Here's what happens. Both die. For sake, and we don't want to parse this, but for sake of this discussion, the rich man is in hell. The poor man is in heaven. It's important to see the rich man's not in hell because he's rich, and the poor man's not in heaven because he's poor.
The Rich Man and Lazarus: A Long-Term Perspective
And the man who is in hell said, "I beg you, Father," He asked that the poor man would come and just dip his finger in the water and give him relief, and that isn't going to happen. And then he said, "Then I beg you, Father, that you send them to my father's house. I have five brothers, that he may warn them, lest they also come to this place of torment." And Abraham said, "They have Moses and the prophets. Let them hear." What's he saying? They've got the scripture. Let them read. Let them hear.
And he said, "No, Father Abraham. If someone goes to them from the dead, they'll repent." He said, "If they don't listen to Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded if someone rises from the dead." That would be Jesus.
I get this all the time. I love to do funerals. I don't like to do weddings so much. But I love to do the funerals. The most difficult funeral to do is for a man you don't know or a person you don't know who they tell you is not a Christian. That's the most difficult funeral to do.
So here's what I will do in that situation. I will say, "Here's Bob. Bob's dead. Can't help you there. Now, I can't even talk about Bob because I don't know Bob. So you are going to have to eulogize Bob." So I stay out of that part. Now it's my part to close it.
What Would the Dead Say to the Living?
And I'll say, "Think with me for a second. Imagine if Bob could come back today, right now, into this room. What would he say to you?" And your instinct is to say, "Well, he'd say, 'Oh, I'm so happy to be with you,' or 'I love you so much,' or 'I miss you so much.'" And I'm saying, "No, based on this story, here's what I think he'd say to you. I think he'd say, 'There's a heaven to gain and a hell to shun. The stakes could not be higher. We're talking about your eternal destiny.'"
See, you better think long term. That's what I'm trying to get at. But as I think long term, here's what happens. It affects how I think today, how I act today. I become a follower of Christ. I understand who Jesus is. I understand who I am.
The Gospel: Every Sin Must Be Paid For
Let me explain this to you. Every person comes into the world and we sin. Our sin separates us from God. God is a God of perfection. God is a God of love. And because He's a God of love, He's a God of hate. And He hates sin, and He must judge sin.
And every sin that's ever committed—yours, mine, ours, everyone—every sin that's been committed must be paid for. And the wage of sin is death. Something has to die. Something has to suffer. So every sin will be paid for in one of two ways. Either A, by Jesus Christ on the cross, or B, by you or me, whoever refuses Christ, will be spending eternity in hell paying the price for that sin. Now that's the truth. Now that long-term reality starts to affect how I live today.
The Rich Fool: A Study in Self-Focus
Look at Luke chapter 12. It's a great parable. If you've been around here for a while, in your Bible it's probably all marked up because it's a guy who is rich. In this case, he's an agribusiness. Made a lot of money. Annual crop, and we'll just assign a value to it—annual crop yields half a million dollars. But on this particular year, he makes five million dollars. Bumper crop.
Well, he has a dilemma. What am I going to do with all this excess? And that's what he begins to try to figure out here in Luke chapter 12, verse 17. "This is what I'll do." And we've told you before, if you mark a circle or mark up your Bible, you'll see that singular personal pronoun. You want to just mark it. Because it's all about I, me, mine. "What shall I do? I have no place to store my grain. This is what I'll do. I'll tear down my barns. I'll build larger ones." My, my, me, me. We see it all over.
And God said to him, "You fool, this very night your soul will be required of you. Now who will have what you've prepared?"
Don't Worry—God Values You
And then what Jesus talks about is, don't be anxious about stuff. In fact, He says, verse 24, "Consider the ravens. They neither sow nor reap, and yet they have no storeroom. And yet God feeds them. Aren't you more valuable than a bird?" By the way, the answer is what? Yeah, you are more valuable than a bird. Good for you.
"And which of you, by being anxious, can add a single cubit to your lifespan?" Here's what He's saying. Worrying about this stuff isn't going to help you live any longer. After Jesus unpacks all this, saying don't worry about what you're going to eat or what you're going to wear, where you're going to live, He said this: "Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also."
Faith Must Impact Life
So here's what we've tried to do, successfully or not. We've tried to say, think long-term. Do I understand who God is? Do I have a relationship with Him through Christ? If I do, then my eternal destination is secure. That issue's taken care of. But now, I have to figure out how I'm going to live. Because if that doesn't impact how I'm going to live, then my faith is useless.
I've got—I'm talking about me—I've got no time for somebody who says I'm a follower of Christ, but it doesn't affect the way I run my house, I handle my marriage, it doesn't affect the way I date, it doesn't affect the way I raise my kids, it doesn't affect, it doesn't affect, it doesn't affect, it doesn't affect. I know all the verses. I can win a game of Bible trivia. I don't care about that. I honestly don't.
My experience has been, generally, we need to be reminded more than instructed. Most of you aren't doing what you already know. Why do you want to go read another book about something and just pile more guilt on yourself? It's real simple. Live it. Do it.
Bringing Faith to Work
Now, when we take and say, "Okay, remember we said we're going to hit the pause button?" We're now back into the lesson. Now, I'm dealing with work. I've got to bring this into the workplace. I cannot segmentize my life and take over—I don't know, segmentize a word? Is it a word today? It is, it's in the vocabulary. Segment would be better, but segmentize has a certain pizzazz to it. I can't segment my life or segmentize. Going with segmentize, I like that. I can't do it. I can't separate it.
There's nothing worse than somebody who comes into church on Sunday with a big old Bible, spitting out all this righteous stuff, and then lives like a pig the rest of the week. You treat people like dirt at work. You're abusive to everybody around you. I really think at that point, you have to question whether you're a follower of Christ or not. You may be a Bible scholar. You may have a PhD in church, but you aren't a follower of Christ.
See, that's the stakes. We've got to go deeper here. If you're in the workplace and you don't take this into the workplace, then I don't think you're ever going to be fulfilled as a follower of Christ. Because as you get more serious about your relationship with Him, you're now talking about the area that occupies a third of your waking hours, at least. And you're saying it doesn't impact that?
I'm going to give you a lot of opinion and a lot of experience, and you can blow it off. I don't care. But I just want to tell you what I think, what I think's important.
The Evolution of Business
There's kind of an evolution of an average business. Remember, we're talking all of you are participants, but it really is toward you that are really owners and managers. When a business starts, oftentimes it's just a customer and an owner. You got an idea or you got a product, and you have a customer, and your mortgage payment is in their pocket, and you've got to figure out how to get it out.
As the business expands, you add another component, and that's the employees. If the business continues to grow, there may be a layer even between the owners and the employees, and that's middle management. Just so you know, I feel your pain. That's the worst place to be.
If I'm in middle management, here's what's happening. The customers are sucking me dry, the employers are sucking me dry, and the owners are sucking me dry. The operative word, by the way, in your job description is what? It sucks, okay? It's sucking everywhere, right? But that's middle management. You kind of want to get out of that job. But that's the whole evolution of business.
Understanding Everyone's Needs
So we're all concerned about needs. Here's what I'm saying in this revolutionary approach to this stuff: I want you to understand the needs, especially of everybody involved. Customers have needs, bosses have needs. I want you to understand employees' needs, and they're basically very simple, and to be really honest and frank, they're everybody's needs.
Here you go: survival, success, and significance. A person has to survive.
I'm playing golf one day in a foursome. There's a guy in there I don't know, and I happen to end up in the cart with him. So I meet new people. I don't know what to talk to him about, so I say, well, what do you do? Well, I run a business. What do you do? And he talked about it.
We're playing a little more, and I'm talking to him about the business, and he made a statement, kind of out of left field, that stunned me. In fact, I three-putted the next green, I think, because of this statement. Here's what he said to me: "I don't understand how my employees survive on what I pay them."
A Revolutionary Approach to Compensation
Now, you've got to know me a little bit. That sets me off like a rocket. I don't understand that. I don't understand why you'd operate that way. Well, because my short-term view is the bottom line's the bottom line, and if I pay this person 20 grand instead of 25 grand, that's five grand I can slide right in my pocket. Now, it doesn't work that way, does it?
Starbucks unlocked that. Starbucks came out and said, "Here's what we're going to do. We're going to give health benefits to our part-time employees." And everybody said, "Well that's nuts, that isn't going to work." They said, "Really? It's not going to work?" They're stable. If you go to the same Starbucks, you tend to see the same people there over and over again, including part-time people. Their training budget is two-thirds less than the industry average because there's no turnover.
A Personal Example
My first year in my own business - you're going to laugh at this maybe, and you know it's naive, just so you know that I believe what I'm saying - we had a small office. Virtually any office, if you get the org chart, the receptionist is kind of at the bottom of that org chart. Our receptionist secretary in 1985 was our first year in business. Our secretary receptionist that year made 43 grand.
See, I believe this stuff. Let me tell you something: we had an energized little office because here's what we did to her. We said, "We're not going to pay you anything. We're going to give you a percent of what we make." You know what? When you called our office, you know what happened? That woman really cared about what happened to your call. When you showed interest in a property, it really mattered to her that we followed up. She didn't blow you off. You weren't a hassle. You were a hamburger to her, okay? You weren't a customer. You talk about an energized environment - this place was it.
Did you catch what I said? That was 20 years ago. I have no idea what that's worth today. Now you may look at that and say that's stupid, but you know what? Everybody in our company was really happy.
Challenging the Paradigm
My suggestion to you - I want to challenge your paradigm that says my receptionist makes 18 grand because that's what the marketplace says, or 20 grand. I don't even know. I'm out of touch. I don't know what the number is. I'd say it's 20 grand. Why do you pay her 20 grand? Because that's what everybody pays. My question is: why do you pay her what everybody pays? How's she supposed to live on that? Why don't you pay her 23? It's three grand. You're going to blow that in a trip - way more than that to go to Pebble Beach.
The lodge and play golf twice and it doesn't affect you at all. This energizes the marketplace. Now you just don't willy-nilly start throwing out money. I'm not saying you pass out money carelessly, but you understand they have to survive.
Here's the second thing: they need to succeed. There needs to be success. I will tell you something - this is a great truth it took me a while to learn. Once I did, I understood this: somebody is never going to have enough of something that they really don't need. They're never going to have enough of it. If I don't really need it - I mean need it crucially - now you have basic needs like food, shelter, all that stuff, but if I sit down and say I need success, I need to succeed, it blows me away.
I don't understand it. I do not have a file for the person who's motivated by the potential to get a desk set. I don't understand it. We're going to have this contest for a desk set? If I want a desk set, I'll go to Staples and get one. I'm not going to work harder for a desk set. But people do it. What does that tell you? For pins and plaques and promotions, people kill themselves. Why? They want to succeed.
Here you go: success is just a part of doing what I'm doing and doing it well, getting some level of recognition, financial success and rewards. But many of you aren't even motivated by that. You know you have enough. How many trips to the Bahamas do you need? You know, probably one more. But see what I'm saying? I'll never have enough of something I really don't need.
The Deeper Need: Significance
What you really need is not success, though you need that stroking. Someone wrote this: people need to experience success, but once they get it, the thrill is over. It must be duplicated at a deeper level and a deeper level. It ultimately becomes empty and hollow.
Here's what I need: I have to survive and I do need to succeed, but I need something deeper. Here you go: significance. I need to be part of something that's bigger than me, something beyond me. My experience is that when we were younger, that was a big deal. We were going to kind of change the world. We were really going to do something different and we were going to be different.
That's how at least my generation manifested it: don't trust anyone over 30. Why? Because we're going to be different from them. Now I say don't trust anyone under 30. But don't trust anyone over 30 - why? We're different. There's an idealism, there's something bigger. I believe many of the people of that generation, myself included, were saying we're going to make a different world, a better world.
You know what? After a period of time we just kind of fell into the real easy trap. All of a sudden we become students of the real world. I meet parents all the time - it's graduation time, so I have a lot of these conversations now, especially with parents whose kids are graduating from high school. You know what they say about their kids? "They're going to get out in the real world." I'm thinking, you know what? You're stealing their dreams. Let them dream. You want to be part of something significant.
How to Find True Significance
Here's what no one told me, but I have the privilege of telling you. I'm going to tell you how to be significant, how to be part of something bigger than you: it's to be actively engaged in the kingdom work of God here on this planet. God's concerned about a couple of things: He's concerned about His word, His church, His people, and lost people. If you're engaged in that enterprise, you're engaged in something that's significant.
I'll tell you something else about God: He's not a God of end results, He's a God of process. I am boycotting the Arizona Republic and I cannot for the life of me remember why. We've been doing it for so long that I can't remember how this got started. I was angry about something and I said I'm done with them. I haven't gotten a local newspaper in 15 years probably. I don't read the paper. You say, "How can he be this smart?" I watch television.
When I see a paper - like usually on Thursday Kerry will come and sit right here and he'll bring the sports page - that's about the only time in the week I read the paper. When I pick up the sports page, I do what? I go right to the standings. I go right to wins and losses. If I get on the computer on Monday and I'm looking up tour stuff, I want to know who won. What did they win? I don't care why. If the wind blew, I couldn't care less. I want to know who won. Results.
God Cares About Process, Not Results
God is exactly the opposite. God doesn't care about the end result. God cares about the process. Great example of that is what we call evangelism. God doesn't care whether you talk to a person and whether they come to Christ or not. God doesn't care as it relates to you - couldn't care less - because that person is only going to be converted if God works in his life or not. So God's the one who's in charge of the results. You are in charge of the process.
It's the exact opposite of how we think, isn't it? If you're sitting in the sales meeting, this guy - have you noticed? - he's not particularly concerned about why the guy didn't buy. It's just: did he buy or didn't he buy? God says no, no, no, no. Evangelism - great thing. Here's what God wants you and me to do: He wants us to proclaim the truth, to be witnesses, to declare and proclaim the gospel. At that point, He's as happy and pleased as He could be with us, whether that other person responds or not. That's not the issue. That's what God does.
That's what God wants in your life. That's why the Christian life is so simple because all He wants is obedience. He's not looking for you to talk to Him about well the barometric pressure dropped so I had to... He doesn't care about excuses. He cares about this and this alone, and that is obedience.
Living Out Faith in the Workplace
When you get to the workplace we can net it out. If you're an employee you give an honest day's work for your pay. If you're an employer you better understand you have a great opportunity to infect this company with biblical principles and a biblical mindset that will energize that company.
Wherever you are—employee, employer, labor, management, regardless of where you are in this scheme—you have to see this workplace as ministry. If you do not, you will be spiritually frustrated. You just won't be able to grow because it occupies a huge chunk of your time.
The Integration of Faith
It gets us into a bigger point, and we're out of time. You cannot segment your faith. You must integrate your faith across the board. The faith that we have of being a follower of Jesus Christ is not something that is isolated. It's something that's integrated throughout our life, and it affects everything that we do, because it affects the way we see the world and the way we see our relationship with all of the things around us. Wonderful truth, huh?
Well, hopefully, in terms of application, this is a little more relevant than last week. Next week, even more relevant as we delve, I think, next week into family. Family or church. We'll look at those two in the next two weeks.
Let's pray. Father, thank You that we can be here today, that we can call You Father for Your work in our life. God, we pray that You would continue to bless us. You have given us so much. God, we pray that we would be faithful. We'll never be worthy, but faithful of the gifts You give us. Good stewards. God, we pray that people who come in contact with us at every level of our life would see Your fingerprints all over us. God, thank You for Jesus. We pray to You in His name. Amen.
Have a great week. We'll see you next week.