Work as Worship
How Your Labor Becomes Your Legacy — Book Excerpt
Work as Worship: How Your Labor Becomes Your Legacy is an interview-based book in which marketplace ministry expert mark Goldstein answered Jacquelyn Lynn’s questions about how to live out your faith in the marketplace. This is the introduction and first chapter.
Introduction
Being a person of faith — any faith — has never been easy. Religious persecution has existed throughout human history. In modern times, rarely a day goes by that we don’t hear about a Christian business being targeted for operating according to Biblical principles. But as important as that issue is, it’s not the focus of this book.
The more compelling message of living as a person of faith centers on the eternal results of how we invest our life on Earth. Once we reach adulthood and get out of school, most of us spend more than a third of our time working. Beyond the mechanics of our jobs, what are we accomplishing? Are we merely putting in the necessary hours until we can get away from the office or the factory to do something else? Or are we using our labor to create a legacy that will reflect our faith far beyond our immediate reach now and for generations to come?
The key to creating that legacy is to make our work an act of worship. And it’s easier than you might think. Whether you’re a rank-and-file employee, a corporate executive, or a business owner, you can leave an indelible imprint on the world through your work.
When I first had the idea to ask Mark Goldstein to sit down with me for a Conversations talk, I thought we’d discuss marketing. After all, the man is a veritable factory of marketing ideas, and he’s passionate about helping others succeed by developing and implementing creative marketing strategies. I’ve included his biography at the end of this book so you can see his credentials.
With his experience, we could cover so many aspects of marketing that would help you grow your business. As I was thinking about how to narrow down the focus, I heard Mark give a speech on marketplace ministry. It was an incredible eye-opener for me, and I knew immediately this was the message that needed to be shared.
Mark agreed. Over several sessions, we talked at length about the challenges Christians face in the workplace and — more importantly — how to turn your particular workplace into a marketplace ministry that will let you serve in ways you never imagined.
Work as Worship is an edited transcript of my conversation with Mark Goldstein about how you can turn your labor into your legacy while practicing marketplace ministry in today’s complex business landscape.
Chapter 1 — Faith in the Workplace
Jacquelyn Lynn: What is the biggest challenge facing Christians in the workplace?
Mark Goldstein: It’s related to a word we hear a lot that’s sometimes overused: purpose. There’s so much talk about finding out what your purpose is. Why am I here? What do I need to do? What happens when I get older — what do I do then? But we’re focusing on the temporal. We’re trying to define our purpose by our jobs, by our families, by our standing in the community, by our hobbies.
I think our biggest challenge comes from the fact that we’re not asking God to reveal his purpose for us.
He knew us before we were in the womb. He made us. He created us for excellence. What did he have in mind when he put Mrs. Goldstein’s egg with Mr. Goldstein’s sperm? What did he have in mind for little Mark? This is what we need to ask; this is what we need to find out.
We serve a loving God who gives us a talent, a skill set, a passion set, and he winds us up and says, “Go and do, go and have fun.” So I think our biggest challenge is understanding that he has equipped us to go and do something for him for eternity.
JL: So the challenge is not that we’re trying to figure out our purpose but that we’re being distracted by worldly things in the process?
MG: Right. Do we identify our purpose as that place where we do business? Certainly, we can use our businesses as a platform. But is there a purpose that’s not necessarily seen on the surface? That’s not readily apparent? I believe there is.
We are so busy just trying to survive. We have responsibilities, we have bills to pay, we have all this stuff going on — it’s like Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Everybody wants to self-actualize, but we first have to deal with the basic needs of survival. Too many people are focused on figuring out how to survive, rather than asking, “How do I thrive?” And the way we thrive is when we know and live God’s purpose for us.
JL: I want to ask you about how we know God’s purpose for us, but first, let’s talk about how Christians can take their faith into the workplace in today’s environment that is so divisive and volatile. We hear stories daily about the cancel culture — meaning that if someone has an opinion the crowd doesn’t share, or does something the crowd finds objectionable, that person is canceled, boycotted, fired, driven out of business. Companies like Chick-fil-A and Hobby Lobby are regular targets. Individual Christians have been attacked for their personal opinions, for the organizations or political candidates they support. It’s understandable that some people feel the safest approach could be to stay quiet about their faith.
MG: I think it comes down to you have to be true to yourself. You have to be true to your own DNA. You have to be comfortable in your own skin.
We’ve all heard the quote usually attributed to St. Francis of Assisi that we should all be ready to preach the gospel at all times and when necessary use words. That’s true.
Christianity is not what we are but who we are. Having faith means having integrity, it means being honest. If you say you are going to do something, do it. Be true to your word. Do the right thing even when it doesn’t seem beneficial to you. We attract people not by what we say but by who they perceive we are — by what we do.
As far as work as worship goes, consider that we spend the lion’s share of our week in the marketplace, doing our jobs.
Of course, you have people who work in the home and they never see anybody or — God bless them — moms and even dads whose career is raising the kids. But for the vast majority of folks, we are in the marketplace a minimum of 40 hours a week. Nowadays the new normal is about 60 hours a week. That’s a lot of hours.
Now, we have some hours sleeping, we have some hours being at home, we have some hours at church and play, but the lion’s share of our week is in the marketplace. So who are we in the marketplace?
If we have a relationship with the Lord, that relationship goes two ways, and everything that we do is a process of how strong that relationship is.
When I have the honor and privilege of engaging with individuals in my work, it’s an honor and privilege because, through those interactions, I get to reflect Jesus in the marketplace. To me, that’s worship. The whole idea of work as worship is: Does what you do reflect who God is?
JL: When I was younger, I had a series of jobs — most that I enjoyed, a few not so much. But they were jobs. I went to work and did them. To me, worship was something people did on Sundays in church. If you had suggested to me then that work could be worship, I would have thought you were nuts. I’m sure a lot of people would agree with me even today. How can work possibly be worship?
MG: Go back to the Garden of Eden. Adam didn’t sit around smelling the flowers and looking at the pretty sky and watching all the nice little critters run around. He had a job, and the job was naming those animals. By naming them, he was in a relationship with God. God gave him a responsibility; Adam accepted the responsibility.
For us, when God gives us skills, an acumen of sorts, and we express ourselves with that acumen and skill, we are, in essence, giving back to him in relationship with what he has given us. It’s that outward working of relationship that’s acknowledging who he is and who we are and the blessing we have in doing what we do — that’s worship.
Honoring God through what I do and what I say, how I interact with people — that comes down to worship.
JL: And to honor God, you don’t even have to say his name.
MG: No, not at all. It’s more effective when you don’t, I think.
JL: When we talk about work as worship, we need to distinguish between two key things. One, doing your work as a form of worship in that you are using the skills and gifts that God gave you and giving them back to him, and, two, actually worshiping the work you do. We are not saying you are to worship work.
MG: Right.
JL: Along with that is that it’s so easy to look at work as drudgery, as just stuff you have to get done. It might be manual labor, it might be a high-level report, but it’s work you have to do. How can you look at that as worship?
MG: By looking at the end game. What are the results, what is being accomplished by this? Whether you are digging a ditch, putting on a roof, doing somebody’s taxes, working on an assembly line — what is the end result? Maybe you are doing the same thing over and over, and you wonder why you’re doing it, you’re bored, you don’t enjoy it. But look beyond the one thing that you’re doing. How is that integral in the end product that goes out the door or the end service that’s provided to the customer? If you don’t do your job with excellence, what will the end product not be able to do? And if it does what it’s supposed to do, how does the end-user benefit?
Let’s say you’re working in a motorcycle factory on the assembly line, doing the same thing over and over, day in, day out. A motorcycle you worked on goes out onto the market. It’s sold and given to somebody who is in the mission field. Because of that motorcycle, because it was built with quality and accuracy, instead of getting to one church, a pastor can get to five churches every week. If work is worship for you, what you do has eternal impact.
It’s the idea of being, as Paul tells Titus in the King James Version, a peculiar person.
Who gave himself for us, that he might redeem us from all iniquity, and purify unto himself a peculiar people, zealous of good works. (Titus 2:14, KJV)
We know that doesn’t mean we are to be odd. But in a world of chaos when we are at peace, and in a world of cold when we are warm, and in a world of hate when we are loving, and in a world of “I don’t care” and indifference when we care, it sets us apart. We are that fish swimming upstream.
People look at us and they say, “Wow, that’s different.” That’s what I think being salt and light is — the light we are reflecting and the salt we are infusing. You know salt was used as a preservative, so if we are infusing our Christian values in the marketplace, there is some preserving there. We are preserving, not by what we say but by who we are.
JL: So you’re saying that we need to look at the marketplace as a ministry field.
MG: Absolutely.
“At the heart of working men and women is the longing — though oft forgotten and sadly despaired of — to participate in something greater than themselves, to belong to a cause that is meaningful and to share in a legacy that endures.” — Richard D. Phillips, The Heart of an Executive: Lessons on Leadership from the Life of King David
Excerpted from Work as Worship: How Your Labor Becomes Your Legacy by Jacquelyn Lynn. Part of the Conversations series. Available in paperback or ebook on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple, Kobo, and more.