Executive Director, InterServe, USA

MAKE THE MOST OF EVERY OPPORTUNITY

Colossians 3:22-4:6

INTRODUCTION BY Pastor Dan Brown: In 1851a woman in England had a vision for reaching women in India, women who were hidden away in Zenanas, as they were called. At about the same time, a woman in New York had a similar vision for women’s ministries, not exclusively in India. The two organizations grew independently for many years, but much later they merged, and went through a number of name changes. When I was growing up in the area where my parents worked in the Sindh Province of Pakistan, our neighbors to the south were missionaries with this organization. The name at the time was the Bible and Medical Missionary Fellowship. Over the years this organization has grown remarkably to where they have people working in hundreds of places, in some of the most difficult places in the world. Our speaker this morning, Doug Van Bronkhorst, is the director of InterServe USA, one of many national sending agencies.

Douglas Van Bronkhorst

InterServe exists to serve churches, especially churches like Stony Brook that want to reach the world for Christ. We send Christian professionals to work in many countries of the world, and many churches like this one participate in the great commission in that way. We just had a summer Candidate School with ten adults in attendance. This is typical of what is happening in the InterServe world. An architect, an educator who will teach English to teachers, a surgeon whose husband will do research, a woman who is a teacher with her doctor husband, a couple who will start a business – we send consummate professionals to do their work, living as Christians in various countries of the world, in some of the neediest places. It is our privilege to help them to do this, and a privilege also to partner with churches like this one.

As we look more directly at scripture, Paul’s letter to the Colossians, chapter 3,verse 22, and a few verses in the beginning of chapter 4, I am reminded of a friend of mine named Skip. That was his legal name, given to him by his parents back in Alabama. Skip was an avid football fan, and he was a very capable engineer in an avionics firm. This was my first job in avionics, and Skip was my assigned mentor. As I worked with him, I discovered there was another part of Skip’s life. At night and on the weekends he was a Southern Baptist evangelist trying to start a Southern Baptist Church in a northern Michigan town. He had a hard row to plow there, but he worked hard at it. Skip was somewhat conflicted. The source of his conflict was related to one of the verses in our scripture passage, toward the end.

Paul says in verses 3-6: “And pray for us, too, that God may open a door for our message, so that we may proclaim the mystery of Christ, for which I am in chains. Pray that I may proclaim it clearly, as I should. Be wise in the way you act toward outsiders; make the most of every opportunity. Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone.”

It was that verse about making the most of every opportunity. In order to share his faith more effectively, Skip thought perhaps he should quit his engineering job and be a full time evangelist and church planter. As I got to know him, he was struggling with that.

I think Paul knew what this was like. Paul was an itinerant evangelist and he was even driven. And here he is in prison, and he is asking for prayer not that he would get out of prison, but that he would be an evangelist in prison; that he would make the most of every opportunity right where he was, in prison, that he would proclaim the message clearly. He had evangelized all over Asia Minor, where the church in Colosse was; he wanted to reach the entire Roman Empire, even as far as Spain. The book of Acts is really the acts of Paul. But there was another side to Paul – he, too, had a day job -- he was a tent-maker. His trade was making tents. He made them and sold them, probably to the biggest customer of all, the Roman Army. Paul was rather proud of being a good tent-maker.

In these verses Paul talks about evangelism, but he does it in the context of the verses that go before, verses about work. This a bit different than what we might expect, but it shouldn’t surprise us that in the first century in talking about work, he should talk about slaves and masters. Much of the work was done by slaves. And many in the church were slaves, or had been slaves. The church appealed to lower classes, people with needs. Perhaps there was even a higher percentage of slaves in a church like Colosse. But basically, Paul is talking about work.

Colossians: 3:22-24 “Slaves, obey your earthly masters in everything; and do it, not only when their eye is on you and to win their favor, but with sincerity of heart and reverence for the Lord. Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for men, since you know you will receive an inheritance from the Lord as a reward. It is the Lord Christ you are serving.”

Here is an interesting principle on the theology of work that really gets at the heart of the verse about “making the most of every opportunity.” What is work really? What is engineering or tent-making really? He doesn’t say this directly, but the background is this: work is good. He is talking here to slaves. They don’t necessarily like their work, or like their workday. He doesn’t say anything negative about the work they do. He could have been negative about slavery, he could have hit that issue head on, but he chooses not to. He talks more about work itself. Work goes back to very beginning of the book of Genesis. God created work. God Himself was a worker. He made the world and the creatures he put into it. He said to the man and the woman, you continue this work. You dress and till this garden. Learn how it works, and in a sense, you can improve what I have begun. Perhaps you think of Adam and Eve as idle rich – given a place to live and nothing to do but enjoy it. Not true – they were working rich. And God made us to work, He made us creative, able to make things with our hands, to do things that are meaningful and helpful to each other. But there is a problem. Work has an evil side to it. These slaves well knew that. Adam and Eve allowed sin to enter the world, and in a painful part of the story, God says to them, “Now there will drudgery involved in your work. It will be hard. It won’t be as much fun any more. Now there will be issues in your work that will make it negative in your lives. You will have to deal with difficult situations and you will be conflicted in your work.” Work now had a downside and it is not because work itself is bad, it’s because it’s not perfect any more. I was a pastor for fourteen years in my last church, and I loved it. I’m often asked, “How do you like your new job?” My response is, “I like it, but it’s not perfect.” I loved my previous job, and I don’t want people to think I left a bad job to take a better job. I love what I’m doing now, but it’s not perfect.

Whatever you do for work, whether you do it for pay, to put food on the table, or whether it’s volunteer work, or what you do in school; perhaps you work at home, not exactly for money, but for other satisfaction, whatever you do, work is good because God gave it to us as a gift. We need to think about it in this way. As Paul says, think about your work about what you’re doing. God gave it to you as a gift. You are not working for your boss, your company, your corporation; you are not working for your supervisor, or for yourself if you’re self-employed. You’re working for God, for Christ, and you are called to give your boss your best ability every day, day in and day out as if you are working for Christ. It doesn’t matter what it is. Paul could not be more clear. This doesn’t mean you can go and rob a bank, but if it is honest labor, you and I should do it for the glory of God. It doesn’t matter what it is – if it’s work, God has given it to us. That’s hard, and a lot of Americans nowadays hate their jobs, and really struggle with this, even Christians. This is an area we need to think through very carefully. This is where we spend a lot of our day, a lot of our time, and it should not be wasted time. It should be where we make the most of every opportunity. This is where we need to be sharing our faith.

I’m reminded of an old monk, Brother Lawrence. Brother Lawrence is famous for one little tract that he wrote. He joined the monastery because he wanted to get close to God. But the newest member of the monastery was sent to the kitchen and given the job of preparing and washing the dishes for the other monks. He began to do those jobs for the glory of God. He used the time in the kitchen cooking and washing dishes as a way of meditating and praying. As Brother Lawrence continued in that monastery he wrote a small booklet called “The Practice of the Presence of God” that is still in print today. The other monks who spent all their time praying and studying the word and fasting, we don’t know what they wrote. But the bottle washer who made it possible for them to do it, gave glory to God and grew closer to God as he did the work that God had given him to do.

Whatever our work may be today, God takes pleasure in it. In western Michigan where I live, men take great pride in their yards. Some would say they spend too much time on it. But a common sight is to see a man sitting in a lawn chair in the middle of his lawn, and I know what he’s doing. He’s sitting there enjoying what he has done, the well-manicured lawn and the flowers and the beauty. I think God sits there and enjoys it with him. When we take delight in our work, and especially when we do it for His glory, God delights in it, too. This is why I like this quote by Gerald Manley Hopkins. He lived in a different time and place when the work was different.

"It is not only prayer that gives God glory but work. Smiting on an anvil, sawing a beam, whitewashing a wall, driving horses, sweeping, scouring, everything gives God some glory if being in his grace you do it as your duty. To go to communion worthily gives God great glory, but a man with a dungfork in his hand, a woman with a sloppail, give him glory too. He is so great that all things give him glory if you mean they should."

This is what Paul is saying here, too. Whatever work we do, if we do it for Christ, will give glory to God. And if this is true, then my work itself becomes part of my ministry. This is not all I do. I have other parts of my life, and you do, too. This is also part of our ministry. I don’t want to get into the dualistic heresy that says there are sacred things and there are secular things; when I put my work on the secular side, and I put other things on the sacred side, and that is when I am actually serving God. When I do my work for the glory of God, and that is my attitude and my approach, that becomes a part of my ministry.

Think again about my friend Skip. I was a brand new engineer, and I was being more completely trained by Skip. I appreciated that. He was good at what he did. Over time as we shared coffee breaks and lunch, I learned more of his personal life. He began to probe into my spiritual life, too, and that was when I discovered he was a Baptist evangelist. I wasn’t too happy about that. I had just come from college where I felt I had been pushed around by a campus evangelist, a really good guy. When I took an engineering job, I was running away from God, running away from that pressure. I knew it, and Skip figured it out pretty quickly, too. It was his testimony that put me over the edge of faith. If he had come to me as another professional evangelist, it wouldn’t have worked at all. But he came to me first of all as a very good engineer. I respected what he did as an engineer, and when he told me about his faith in Christ, I respected that. I didn’t disrespect the campus evangelist. But when Skip shared his faith with me, it added a different side to life, and I think that is often how God works. In fact, I think that is how God intends to get his work done in the world. He does call some to be evangelists, pastors, teachers. I made my living as a pastor. But most of us are called to do something else.

I’m a major league baseball fan, and I had a chance for several summers to be a chaplain for to the Detroit Tigers and to the Oakland A’s when I was in California. There is this chaplain program in Major League Baseball. On Sunday mornings they met for a short worship service in separate locker rooms for a short worship service. I would go from one locker room to the other. I appreciated the opportunity to give them this brief time before the game. It was great to be a part of it, and I had a great season, even when the Tigers were in a major slump a few years ago. But there were rules – the head chaplain told me that I shouldn’t take advantage of the position to get autographs or anything else for myself. I was there to minister to them. But I made another rule for myself. I told myself before I went in there on Sunday morning that I hoped it would be beneficial, that they would have this place of peace and learning and worship before they went out to work. But I knew that the real work in their lives would not be done by me on Sunday morning. It would be done by the Christian baseball players on their teams – professional baseball players who lived and shared their faith with their teammates every day.

That’s the church at work; it’s not in a room on a Sunday. It’s what happens 24/7 out in the world. Go out there and do your job well and give glory to God there. That is how the Kingdom will grow. That’s what we ought to say to each other, to encourage each other when we get together, to continue in love and good works, and to do it all for the glory of God, and that is how the Kingdom will grow. I was at a church awhile back, and they were having a ministry fair. Behind the tables there were people representing the ministries of the church. It was quite impressive, with representatives of children’s ministries and men’s ministries and women’s ministries and many others. But I was disappointed – every one of them was a church-based ministry. What I would like to see is engineers over here, teachers there, administrators, businessmen, state legislators, politicians – these are the people doing their work as a ministry to the glory of God. This is where the work of the church is being done. This is what I do in my work in InterServe: I send people overseas to do their work cross-culturally. It’s the same thing I’ve been doing as a pastor for 30 years.

Recently I spoke in a church, and I had a woman doctor along. She is working in a remote village in Afghanistan. If she were not there and her colleagues, there would be no health care for those people. She spoke to the people about being a Christian doctor, about doing her work for the glory of God in that remote Muslim place. When she finished I asked the people, “Why did I have Erin here? Was it so you could say, wow, what a super Christian? What a spiritual person – I could never be like that. No! Did I have her here so you would support missions? Well, yes, partly, because that is my job. But the primary reason I have her here is so that you can say, if she can do that in such a difficult place, I can do my work for the glory of God right here in Oklahoma.” And I guess you can do it here in Massachusetts.

If you want to do your work for the glory of God in North Africa or Asia or the Middle East, come talk to me. I can help you get there. But I hope you’re doing it here right now. The only difference is over there or right here that you do your work for His glory, that you give glory to Him right now where you are, as a part of your ministry for Him.