P.O. Box 53055    
Los Angeles, CA 90053   

WORKING FOR THE LORD AT CIRCUS-CIRCUS

The story is told of a new boss who moved into the corner office of a frantic, busy company. And after a couple of weeks he gathered the staff around and said: “Look, here’s my goal. I want to be able to walk down any hallway of this place, stick my head into any corner, go into any cubicle, enter any workroom . . . and find that people are working. Not goofing off. Not reading magazines. Not crocheting. Not playing ‘Free Cell’ on their computers. Working! Is that such a hard concept to comprehend? I walk in ANYTIME. . . and I find you working.” He looked around from one person to the next. “Now, does anybody have any suggestions as to how we can achieve this goal?” After a long pause, a guy with a ponytail raised his hand, and said: “Yeah. Wear shoes that squeak when you walk.”

Well, the downtrodden among us kind of appreciate that proposal, but you know, there’s nothing very ha-ha funny about an item that appeared in the Los Angeles Times on June 19, 2002. It’s entitled “Need for Speed Has Workers Seething,” by Nancy Cleeland. Apparently the suits in the corner offices, in an attempt to maximize profits in this tough economy, are squeezing the workers out on the assembly line for more output. In Las Vegas, maids who used to clean 14 rooms per shift are now expected to drag their way through 17. In a frozen-food plant in Marshall, Missouri, the hourly-paid workers have to put out 1,200 chicken pot pie dinners an hour, compared with 1,100 just two years earlier and 800 back in 1980. A lady named Christina Roman, who packed airline meals for 24 years, got fired when she just couldn’t keep up. The corporation sent strangers into her work area with clipboards and stopwatches just to see how fast everyone was cranking out the trays. If you couldn’t do three a minute, 180 an hour, they axed you. And this staff writer for the Times quotes a David Huerta, organizer for the Service Employees International Union Local 1877 here in L.A., who says in frustration: “Owners are going to have to realize these are not machines cleaning their buildings. You can’t just crank up the dial. People have reached their max. Asking more of them now would mean all-out war.”

Well, if you’ve been with us all week, maybe you think we’re stuck in a time-warp back to yesterday or even 1860, where the issue of slavery was our main concern. But as we study here in Ephesians chapter 6, we find that whether the world reality is slavery and the master on the plantation, or assembly-line work with a foreman out at Gate 73A’s boarding ramp at United’s Terminal Seven at LAX, the Word of God has some powerful statements of encouragement for those who punch a time clock. Here are verses five and six, as expressed in The Message paraphrase:

“Servants [or employees], respectfully obey your earthly masters [or supervisors] but always with an eye to obeying the REAL Master, Christ. Don’t just do what you have to do to get by,” “when their eye is on you,” says the NIV – speaking of squeaky shoes, “but work heartily, as Christ’s servants doing what God wants you to do.”

Right away we notice that for the Christian in the workplace, you are actually in a vertical relationship with Jesus. No matter what it says on that employee badge they make you wear from a lanyard around your neck, you’re really working for Him and obeying His instructions.

Is this realistic? Can that hotel maid trying to clean up tourists’ rooms at the Circus-Circus Hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada, really think to herself that she’s working for Jesus? Yes. I don’t know if she can do 14 rooms or 17 per shift — that’s up to the union and management to work out — but the Bible teaches that she should do her best. Clean that room as though doing it for the Lord. Clean that room with the idea in mind that “one of the least of these My brethren” will be staying there that evening after a long, exhausting drive on the I-15. If you’re working for Lufthansa, packing those meals onto trays, you keep it in your mind that, just as Jesus was kindhearted enough to feed 5,000 hungry people and used His 12 disciples to roll the food-and-beverage carts up and down the aisles there on the shores of Galilee, you’re helping Him sustain a couple hundred of His children.

Let’s return again to the excellent Tyndale New Testament Commentary, which has guided us along this Ephesians path for almost three months now. In studying chapter six here, author Francis Foulkes goes back to that expression, “Obey your earthly masters with respect and FEAR,” and quotes from J. O. F. Murray as follows:

“‘An element of “fear,”’” he writes, “‘enters into all relationships when their essential sacredness is realized.’” And we say, “Sacredness? Changing sheets at Circus-Circus can be ‘sacredness’?” Yes. Foulkes continues: “That sacredness is expressed here by the phrase as unto Christ. Whatever the Christian does is to be done as to the Lord, and this is particularly true of the attitude of submission that he is to show towards others. It means, moreover, the transformation of the Christian’s entire standards of work and service into something totally different from the standards of the world. Work and service are to be rendered to an earthly master, as if they were being offered to the heavenly Lord Himself.”

Foulkes reminds us of a similar passage in Romans 14, where Paul tells us that this vertical connection to Jesus impacts any Christian, at all times, whether he’s packing meals for Lufthansa or eating them! Listen:

“He who eats meat, eats to the Lord, for he gives thanks to God; and he who abstains, does so to the Lord and gives thanks to God. For none of us lives to himself alone and none of us dies to himself alone. If we live, we live to the Lord; and if we die, we die to the Lord. So, whether we live or die,” or work, we might add, “we belong to the Lord.”

Linking back to yesterday, even the slave in chains could take comfort from this. Sure, a mean man with a whip or a flowchart or a Wall Street letterhead might be your temporary “boss” here on earth, but if you’re a Christian, you’re actually working for gentle Jesus, meek and mild, who knows your every weakness. The Adventist commentary for Ephesians six reminds us:

“Human slavery may imprison the body, but it can never subjugate the spirit. Paul is here incidentally declaring the limitations of human slavery, which was able to demand the service of the body but could not command the spirit.”

We found a wonderful paragraph in our newly discovered resource: Commentary on the Epistles to the Ephesians and Colossians, by E. K. Simpson and F. F. Bruce. They point out that, first of all, it’s a wonderful thing to actually be working for Jesus. Secondly, He’s been there too. He had to meet quotas in the carpenter shop. He experienced sleepless nights when He ministered beyond the call of duty. He knew exhaustion and 60-hour weeks. Here’s what they write:

“Drudgery becomes ‘divine’ when rendered ungrudgingly and with honest goodwill; for conscientious service disarms even severity of its frown. The treadmill of menial employment ceases to be bitterly irksome, moreover, when trodden in obedience to the will of the sovereign Employer whose rewards are priceless and inviolably guaranteed.”

Keep THAT in mind too, by the way. That hotel may be paying you minimum wage; you may be forced to share an apartment with two other divorced women just to manage the rent and child care for your kid . . . but friend, Jesus has a record of it all, and is right now building you a mansion on the concierge level of heaven’s best five-star hotel. Simpson and Bruce continue:

“Let them imbibe the mind of Christ Himself. Jesus has served in the ranks of duteous obedience without a trace of impatience or repining. Singleness of aim, the polar opposite of duplicity, should betoken His disciples.” And now we hear yet again about the squeaky shoes. “They will not stint themselves to the minimum of performance that will pass muster; their motto must be thorough. Evasion of [unpleasant] jobs will be at times their temptation; but they will scorn eye-service to man, when they feel conscious that they are working under their heavenly Master’s eye and striving to please Him, solicitous most of all that their labors should bear inspection from the viewpoint both of earth and heaven.”

William Barclay puts it this way:

“The conviction of the Christian workman is that every single piece of work he produces must be good enough to show to God.”

And finally, when you clean those 14 hotel rooms and still have three to go before you can punch out, remember heaven. That writing team of Simpson and Bruce encourages us with this closing thought:

“The majestic horizon of eternity reduces the temporal status of the believer to a minor consideration. He who is the Lord’s freeman, though outwardly debased, has a far grander heritage and destiny than his pagan employer. It is his to discover in every mundane relationship scope for manifesting a heavenly frame of mind and thus recommending his religious frame to favorable notice. Even Menander could write: ‘Serve freely and thou shalt be no slave.’”