You are deeply loved, completely accepted, and fully forgiven by God. We don’t work to earn God’s love. We happily give our best because we are so deeply loved. So the gospel transforms the way we work and think about our work.

September 23-24, 2017

Pastor Joe Wittwer

God and Your Work

#1—God’s Plan for Your Work

Introduction and offering:

ILL: Many years ago, I was getting after our teenage son, Jeff, for not completing a chore. He got upset and yelled, “You don’t get it, Dad. I don’t like to work.” Oh… that’s good to know.

Let’s be honest—how many of you ever feel that way? There are some things I’d rather not do. But the reality is that we were made to work, and without work, we fail to become the people God intended us to be. God has a plan for your work.

There are subjects that I return to regularly because they are of such universal importance: sex, relationships, marriage, sex, money, forgiveness, sex…and work. The gospel—God’s good news of abundant life in Jesus—the gospel is good news for all of life. It is good news for our relationships, for our marriages, for how we live as sexual creatures, and what we do with money. And it is good news for how and why we work. Most of us will spend the majority of our adult waking hours working. What good news does God have for us about our work?

Because this is universally important, every few years I do a series of talks on what God has to say about our work. For this series, I’m borrowing heavily from Tim Keller’s brilliant book, Every Good Endeavor. Tim is the recently retired pastor of Redeemer Church in Manhattan, New York. Some of you will recognize his name because we used his book, The Meaning of Marriage a few years ago for a marriage series. The guy is scary smart! Every Good Endeavor is one of the best books I’ve ever read on a Christian view of work. Every chapter is worth an entire sermon or more—and we’ll be covering four chapters per sermon. So if you want to go deeper, get the book and read it. You won’t regret it.

I’m praying that you will gain a Christian perspective on work in general and your work in particular, and that you will throw yourself into your work with a fresh sense of calling and purpose and joy.

Offering here.

In the beginning…there was work. Let’s read the Scripture.

Genesis 1:1 In the b