John 6:26-29

Jesus said, “You are looking for me not because you saw miraculous signs but because you ate the loaves and had your fill. Do not work for food that spoils, but for food which endures to eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you. On Him God the Father has placed his seal of approval. Then they asked him, “What must we do to do the works God requires?” Jesus answered, “The work of God is this: to believe in the one he has sent.”
 
I left university with a degree in Theology and was incarcerated in a firm of accountants in Leeds for a year. Despite their best efforts they couldn’t turn me into an accountant and eventually I found my way into Financial Services where I spent the following 30 years. I took all the exams the profession offered and accumulated experience and expertise to become a Financial Planner or Independent Financial Adviser.
 
In the last decade my time has increasingly been taken up with leading and pastoring this church and so I have steadily reduced my business hours and increased my church hours. The church has started paying me a part-time salary. About this time last year I agreed with my business partner to further reduce my business hours so that I worked just one day a week for the firm.
 
About the same time I went on the annual Financial Planning conference at Celtic Manor (where NATO recently met). This is a big posh do with the leading financial bods from around the UK meeting for the usual combination of training, sharing ideas, networking, drinking and eating. I was standing in a group of financial advisers of about my age – amongst whom I was probably one of the most experienced and qualified. Somehow we got onto the subject of my work for the church. What happened next is etched in my memory, it plays in slow motion like a film. I was expecting to be taken into a discussion about faith and religion and, hopefully, Jesus. Instead, I saw the light dawn on the other men and women in the group as they realised that I was a part-timer. In fact they realised, as did I, that Financial Planning was not my major pre-occupation; that I was on my way out. And very quickly, almost brusquely, they turned away, changed the subject back to the latest software advances and ignored me.
 
I am not used to being ignored. And it dawned me that I had lost my identity as a Financial Planner – certainly as far as they were concerned. I realised that they were right. You can’t really be a one-day-a-week Financial Planner – it’s too demanding in terms of qualifications and intensity of training and compliance. I looked ahead a few months or years down the road and I realised that I was going to have to give up my registration as a Financial Planner if I was going to continue to focus on being what is technically called a Minister of Religion.
 
I realised that 30 years of work, training and experience had become very important to me. My identity was far more wrapped up in that professional accreditation than I realised. My shift to church planting involves grappling with my identity as a professional, as a worker. I am finding it hard to set that aside. But it is forcing me to work out who I am and what I am for.
 
In the grim days of 1939 and 1940 notices about National Service were posted up in Employment Exchanges throughout Great Britain. The official orders stated that, “All persons in the above age-groups are required to register for National Service except lunatics, the blind and Ministers of Religion.” 
So that puts me in my place.
 
We are looking at a series on work – God at Work – and today’s theme is “Work Idol”. My own experience has helped me look at this with new eyes. I started the series last week by explaining that work is good. That God is a worker and that he gives us work to do. We have 250,000 hours in this life in which we are working in some form or another – paid or unpaid, visible or invisible, physical or mental work.
 
But we live in a broken world and often good things get spoilt. Work can be great but it can also go bad and one of the most damaging ways in which the enemy uses work to wreck our lives is when it becomes an idol. When work goes from being good to being a god. A work idol.
 
The idolatry of work is a relatively recent development. When the Jews and then the Christians spoke of God being a worker and of putting man to work in paradise (Genesis 1:28 and 2:15) they turned ancient thinking on its head. Traditionally work was demeaning and to be minimised and the intellectuals and ruling elite tried to avoid work as much as possible. It was considered superior to be able to sit around thinking great thoughts than to actually do business or clean houses or cook food.
 
Work has turned into a celebrity in its own right now. We look in awe at those people who work really hard and do lots of work. The Prime Minister isn’t allowed to have a holiday because he should be at work. The thought of a day off for a trainee banker is out of the question. We all want our kids to study every hour of the day in order to excel in their exam results so that we can load them onto Facebook with pride.
 
The truth about work, as revealed in the bible was revolutionary in its time and elevated work as a good thing, it brought dignity to work and tells us to treat the brain surgeon with the same value and affirmation as the person who cleans the corridors and the person who pours our coffee.
 
However, we have taken something good and turned it into a god. Work has become our purpose and identity and affirmation. Something I realised afresh last year.
 
An idol is something which is made and which may be good but which we have made a god. There is only one God, the God who created the world, who is revealed to us in the bible, and whom we know through Jesus.
 

When something becomes an idol:

• We worship it, giving it honour and status
• We serve it, allowing it to control our times and our energy
• We sacrifice to it, time, financially and in our resources
• We find our identity in it, our planet revolves around its sun
• We allow it to give us worth

 
It can be a hobby, or a car, or our children, or our work.
 
This is part of what is going on in Jesus’ discussion with the Jews in John 6. He’s just fed thousands of people and walked on the water. They are impressed – mainly by the miraculous provision of food. There weren’t any MacDonalds or Nandos in the village. No Aldis or Waitrose. Food was scarce and most people had to find it themselves. So a magical provision like this was very appealing. You can sense that they are willing to worship, to idolise whatever will get them food.
 
Verse 26, “you are looking for me, not because you saw miraculous signs but because you ate the loaves and had your fill.”
 
Miraculous signs point to God. They didn’t look that far, just grabbed the food. In other words, you’ve already taken your eyes off God and been seduced by stuff.
 
Verse 27, “Do not work for food that spoils, but for food that endures to eternal life.”
 
Yes, work is good and we need to work, but our purpose, our focus, must be on God and on his provision for eternity.
 
Verse 27, “On him God the Father has placed his seal of approval.”
And then Jesus lays claim to God’s seal of approval. God the Father has sealed him, put his mark on him, and authenticated him. And you know what? Isn’t that what we’re all looking for? The seal of approval. The approval of our friends and family, the approval of our colleagues, the approval of our boss, the examining board, and, most of all, the approval of God.
 
Wouldn’t it be great if you could get a seal of approval which ticked all those boxes of needing to know that you’re okay, that things will be all right, that you have been forgiven, accepted? That there is something for you to do, given and authorised by God? That there is a purpose for your life which stretches into a heavenly eternity?
 
Verse 28, 29, The Jews certainly liked the sound of that. “What must we do to do the works God requires?” How can we get that approval, that seal of acceptance and purpose and destiny?
 
“Jesus answered, “The work of God is this: to believe in the one he has sent”.”
 
In other words, you can’t work your way into acceptance by God. The core of your being bursts into life when you believe in Jesus, in the one who died to save you. The purpose of life and work and everything starts and ends with knowing the love of Jesus and choosing to believe in him and follow him.
 
Work is good but if we go to it for approval, for affirmation, for identity, just to feed ourselves and our materialism then we will miss out on the greater good, on God’s call, and we will turn work into an idol.
 
We are all at work, in one way or another, whether we are picking the kids up from school, tending to a relative, jetting around the world doing business deals, on mission overseas, answering the phone for the Samaritans or serving hamburgers, but our work is not to be our master or our god.
 
Colossians 3:23 reminds us, “Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for men, since you know that … it is Lord Christ you are serving.”
 
Mother Theresa was once asked, How do you see yourself? She replied that she saw herself as a “Pencil in the hand of God”. It was God who gave her her purpose and her identity.
 

For many of you, work has become an idol. Work has become your purpose and your identity. My business life was in danger of becoming an idol for me. 

• You think about work all the time, your Blackberry is creeping under the duvet with you.
• Work is taking priority in your life – over your marriage and your children and your walk with God.
• Your life decisions are dictated by work and what it can provide - not by what God has called you to do.
• Your identity revolves around your job, your title. That is where you get approval, what makes you feel good about yourself.
• You have got yourself into a financial position whereby you can’t choose what work to do because you have a mortgage to service, children to educate, cars to insure, a pension to worry about.
• You gain your accomplishment from work not from sanctification – becoming more like Jesus.

Some of you have lost jobs and realised that this was all true. Others, if you were to lose your job tomorrow, your world would come crashing down.
 
You have a choice today.
You can choose to worship God or you can choose to worship work.
 
If you make work an idol and an object of worship you will find that it offers only a chimera of reward.
Work will not love you.
Work will not speak with you.
Work does not know you or want you.
Work makes a siren call of fulfilment and success only to prove hollow and passing.
 
Choose to worship God.
Choose to give your life over to the one who does love you and shows it in the life and death of Jesus.
Choose the one whose Holy Spirit lives within you and does speak, with words of truth and comfort.
Choose to follow only Jesus, the one who has the power to redeem you and sustain you with new life.
 
Don’t worship work but offer it up as an act of worship to the God who has called you into his work. Instead of worshiping a false idol of work you can take the work he has given you, whatever it is, however menial or brilliant, however visible or invisible, paid or unpaid. And with the power of his Holy Spirit in your life your work can become something transformative, redemptive and part of his saving, nurturing, sustaining mission.

 
A time for repentance and prayer.
I have taken my eye off the ball and allowed myself to get seduced by work.
I am allowing work to encroach on my life in an unhealthy way.
My worship, due to you, has spilt over into making work an idol.
I repent – I change my mind and choose to walk a different direction.
Forgive me – I receive your forgiveness and love.
Fill me with your Spirit, may I know your love for me more and more.
Equip me to work really well, but to work primarily for you.
May my purpose be to do what you have given me to do, to believe in you and worship you.
 
Our purpose in this life is not “work”. Work is what we have been given to do to join in with God’s work as he creates and cultivates and nurtures and sustains. We are the fingers of God, a pencil in his hand. But our purpose is to know Jesus, to worship him, to receive his love and forgiveness. To give him the whole of our lives in thanks and praise and worship.