Abound In Work | Abide In Love

Today I’d like to take a look at two statements from Scripture.

And focus in on two words that are not terribly common in our day, but are very, very important for people who are looking to follow the way of Jesus.

The first word is written by Paul to the church at Corinth.

Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians 15:58:

Therefore, my dear brothers and sisters, be steadfast and immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, because you know your labor in the Lord is not in vain.

The first word I want to focus on is this word “abound.”

We don’t use this word very much, but it was one of Paul’s favorite words.

It meant to overflow
to be full
to excel in something
or to have tremendous energy for the work God has given you

Paul also says in Colossians 3:23:

Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for human masters.

Whatever your job is, give it everything you’ve got as if you were working for the Lord, not for another human being.

The idea here is — God gives everyone work to do.

whether you get paid for it or not
whether you’re a volunteer or retired
whether you do work in an office or at a church
whether you go to school or stay at home

Part of how God made us is to contribute, to create, to produce value and make the world a better place.

Now, after the Fall — after sin — work fell under the curse.

And then, God said, “You will labor by the sweat of your brow.” Work would get frustrating.

But work itself is part of what God does.

God creates, and he made us in his image to do work, to create. That’s a good thing.

And God says over and over again in Scripture:

I want you to excel at what you do.
I want you to abound.
I want you to use the gifts and talents I’ve given you to the fullest potential that you’re capable of.
I want you to discover the deepest passions that are hardwired into you.
I want you to fan them into flames.
I want you to make a difference in this world.

The writer of Ecclesiastes puts it like this. Ecclesiastes 9:10:

Whatever your hand finds for you to do, do it with all your might.

All your might! “Don’t just punch a clock.”

Have you ever seen a group of people who are not abounding in their work?

Any of you watch the Warriors last season?

They were not abounding. They were not doing whatever their hands found for them to do with all their might.

Have you been to the DMV lately?

I don’t mean to say anything negative, but the last time I walked in the DMV, it was not pulsating with energy and creativity and joy, standing in line.

There were some people there who looked like they had not read Ecclesiastes 9:10 for a really long time.

The language that’s used to talk about how people do what God gives them to do, in Scripture, are very different words.

Paul says at one point, “I have been poured out like a drink offering.” It means, “I’ve expended myself with what God gave me to do.”

This is not a picture of casual, comfortable labor offered when my personal world happens to make it easy or convenient.

Paul says things like, “I have fought the good fight.”

That’s hard work.
That’s painful sometimes.

“I have run the race.”

That’s laborious.

“I have kept the faith.”

What God made us to want to experience when we get to the end of our lives is to be able to say to God:

I abounded in the work you gave me.
It may or may not have looked very impressive to other people.
It wasn’t perfect by a long shot.
But whatever my hand found for me to do, I really did try to do it with all my might.
I tried to work with all my heart, as though I was doing it for you, God.

Alright, here’s the other statement I want to look at today, and these are the words of Jesus as they were recorded by John.

Jesus says to his followers in John 15:4

Abide in me, as I also will abide in you. No branch can bear fruit by itself; it must abide in the vine. Neither can you bear fruit unless you abide in me.

Jesus is saying:

You can’t bear fruit by yourself.
You can’t accomplish good things.
You can’t become the kind of person you need to become all by yourself just by trying really hard.
You must abide in me.

That’s a very, very important word.

We don’t use it too much in our day, but Jesus did.

Sometimes it is translated to remain.
Sometimes it means to dwell with or to linger with.
So when Jesus says that we’re to abide with him, the idea is that we are to live always connected to him in an intimate, loving, unhurried, peace-producing, ongoing relationship — to be with him, to listen to him.

In our day, people will sometimes talk about being centered, or being deeply rooted spiritually. That’s what this abiding language is getting at.

I want to abide with God.
I’d like to be a man of deep prayer.
I’d like to be a fully authentic human being.
I don’t want to just skim over life.
I don’t want to skim the highs and lows of life emotionally.
I’d like to experience life deeply.
I don’t want to go through my life as a driven, obsessed person.
I don’t want to live in the frenzied pace of a world that is certifiably insane.
I want to be a really good dad.
I want moments with my children.
I want to savor every bit of the mystery and wonder and love of marriage.
I want to have deep, intimate, open, life-giving friendships.
I want to have my mind more formed by Scripture than my phone.
I’d like to do what the Psalmist did. I’d like to have the Lord as my Shepherd, make me lie down in green pastures, lead me beside still waters, restore my soul.

This is the invitation of Jesus — these are such beautiful words:

Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light. (Matthew 11:28-30)

So I find myself in this position. On the one hand —

I want to abound in my life.
I want to run the race.
I want to fight the fight.
I want to throw myself into the work God has for me.
I want to grow, risk, sacrifice, leave everything I can on the field.
I want to abound in the work God has for me to do.

On the other hand —

I want to abide.
I want to walk deeply with God.
I want to pray.
I want to listen.
I want to love.
I want to learn to be content.
I want to be still and know that he is God.

I want to abide. And I want to abound.

Here’s what I find. I find that in this world, in my life, there is often an enormous tension between trying to both abound in what God gives me to do, and abide in the love God has for me.

It’s possible to do one or the other, but to do both is very difficult.

I want to do good work.
My job involves a lot of teaching. I want to be the best teacher I can be.
I want to give the best that I can to the people I work with — to our board, to our staff, to our church, to other organizations I get to be involved with.

This is very personal for me.

I remember, a while ago, giving a message and sitting down in the courtyard after I was done. This was back when we were at Foothill High School.

And I had that very painful feeling that it fell so far short of what it could have been, what it should have been.

And I talked to Joe, our executive pastor, and Joe agreed with my assessment. Joe gives me real honest feedback on how I’m doing in my work, which I invite.

But I don’t ever want someone else to push me harder in my work than I push myself.

I want my standards for my work, between me and God, to be higher than anyone else sets for me. Not in a neurotic sense. Not in a perfectionistic or self-absorbed way, but because this is my one-and-only chance to get to do what I was born to do.

This is my race, and I’ll never have another one.
This isn’t Joe’s race. He’s got one.
It’s not our Board’s race. They have their own.
It’s not yours. You have yours to run.

This is the only race I get to run, and I want to run it really well.

And then you add to that race other pressures.

I often wrestle in my work. We all have work that God calls us to do. Mine involves talking about God or faith, or spiritual life, or prayer.

And you might think that that would lead automatically to spiritual growth. In some ways it’s helpful. But in some ways, it’s quite dangerous.

I ask myself all the time — am I really committed to and actually living the things that I talk about? Or do I sometimes say things just because I want to be successful in my job?

I experience this tension.

How can I abound with energy and passion and growth and devotion with all my might at what God gives me to do?
And how can I abide with intimacy and depth and stillness and richness and contentment in my life with God?

I want to make a series of observations, in the time that’s left, about managing this tension between abounding and abiding.

And the first observation I’ll put in the form of a question.

When can I expect this tension to go away?

Anyone want to take a guess?

When you die.

Interestingly, Jesus wrestled with this throughout his whole life.

He gets baptized. He’s ready to start his work as a teacher, as a rabbi, and God, in the person of the Holy Spirit, sends Jesus out into the desert to spent 40 days and nights alone with God, fasting and praying in solitude.

He has him go and just abide before he does anything.

Then he begins his work, and soon people are coming to him, the writers of Scripture say, from all over the region — from all over that part of the world. And it’s very draining.

So at the beginning of his ministry — this is the first chapter of the book that Mark writes about Jesus’ life. He says:

Very early in the morning, while it was still dark, Jesus got up, left the house and went off to a solitary place, where he prayed. (Mark 1:35)

He was abiding.

Now, he does that for a while. Pretty soon, Simon Peter — one of his disciples — and some of the other guys come to Jesus and say to him:

Simon and his companions went to look for him, and when they found him, they exclaimed: “Everyone is looking for you!” (Mark 1:36-37)

Where have you been? Everyone’s looking for you. You’ve got no cell phone, no email, no find my friends app, how are we supposed to know where you are?”

And it’s real interesting. In that moment, Jesus doesn’t say to him, “Hey Peter, back off. I’m abiding. Leave me alone.”

At that moment:

Jesus replied, “Let us go somewhere else—to the nearby villages—so I can preach there also. That is why I have come.” (Mark 1:38)

He chooses to abound for awhile.

His whole life is this rhythm between abiding deeply, being alone with the Father, and abounding in the work that the Father gives him to do.

And every human being who’s interested in following Jesus has to wrestle with that tension.

And that tension will not get any easier in our lifetime.

Gallup researchers tell us the average work week is now 47 hours per week. We’ve added 7 hours to the work week in America. And 50 percent of the people say they work more than 50 hours per week.

In addition to that, you have to add all the work that gets done around the house.

Gallop researchers have found that the average husband actually spends more time doing work around the house than the average wife does.

I just made that up, actually. They didn’t find that.

But we can fully expect to wrestle with this tension until we die.

Because this is what I find — I find if I adjust my life for one season, then something changes.

It changes at work.
It changes at home.
It changes in my spiritual life.

And I need a different arrangement, a different routine.

Then I’ve got to change again. It’s never set. We’re going to wrestle with this tension between abiding and abounding until the day we die.

This leads to a second observation, which I’ll put in the form of a question.

Who is responsible for me getting this right?

Take a guess.

I am.

Who is responsible for you getting this right?

No, I’m not responsible. You are responsible for that one.

Not your boss
Not your pastor
Not your spouse
Not your parents
Not the company you work for

It’s you.

I say this because it boggles my mind the extent to which people seek to abdicate responsibility for their one-and-only lives, which go by so fast.

And people end up not living the lives they intended to at all, not abounding in work and not abiding in God’s love.

But they’ll talk about it as if someone else ought to arrange their life so it can happen, and this abdicating of responsibility starts so early in life.

Ken Davis writes about seeing this in his daughter.

He had a young daughter at the time, and he was trying to get her to go to bed at night.

She was the kind of kid that turned into an excuse factory at night.

This is what he writes:

“Go to bed,” I told my daughter.

Stalling, she said, “Daddy, does God talk to us?”

“Yes, God talks to us,” I said.

“Tracy, go to sleep. We’ll discuss it in the morning.” Being a fool, I imagined that would satisfy her.

“No, we must discuss it now!” she yelled back. “God just spoke to me.”

Before I could frame an appropriate theological response, she added, “He said I could get up!”

“Tracy, go to bed,” I commanded.

“I need a drink of water,” she shot back.

The verbal sparring match intensified. “You can’t have water.”

“Why?”

“You’ll wet the bed.”

“I quit wetting the bed.”

How do they respond so quickly? Do they have a game plan? Do they pull random thoughts out of thin air? Is this the root of original sin?

“You didn’t quit wetting the bed,” I countered. “You wet the bed just last night.”

She was quick: “The cat did that.”

She said it without hesitation, without blinking. Maybe she’s going to be a lawyer. I ignored the opportunity to laugh. Instead, I made my move to protect my authority.

“Don’t tell me the cat did it,” I bellowed. “The spot on your bed was the size of a large pizza. We only have a tiny, little kitty.”

“It wasn’t our cat,” she said.

She was a true professional. Yes, she was going to be a lawyer. And she was shocked — SHOCKED — that I would not believe her.

I held her by the shoulders. “Look me in the eye,” I said, “and tell me the truth.”

Her bottom lip began to quiver. A huge tear welled up in her eye. “I’m sorry, Daddy,” she sobbed, “but a big, giant cat took the screen off my window and jumped on my bed. He wet my bed. Then he jumped back out the window.”

Sensing my skepticism, she continued. “He put the screen back on after he left. That’s why it’s still there.”

I was speechless.

“He was a big cat,” she added as I kept silent.

I was coming to a slow boil. “I can’t believe you’d lie to me like this,” I scolded.

“I want you to go straight to bed, and I don’t want to hear another peep out of you.” I learned that one from my father.

Evidently, such things lose their power between generations, because I could hear her in her bedroom making tiny, little peeping sounds.

Then, after a few more moments of precious, lovely silence, a defiant, little voice screeched from the bedroom, “Daddy, I want water and I want it now!”

The gauntlet had been thrown down. My parental authority was up for grabs. I had only one option. I called on the sacred and hallowed words of parents from across the reaches of time.

“If I hear one more word from you,” I roared, “I’ll come in there and give you a spanking.”

“When you come,” she said, “bring a glass of water.”

We’re all a little excuse factory… and it starts so early.

And people can go through their whole life that way, never abounding in the work God gave them to do. What their hand finds to do with all their might, they don’t do that; not abiding deeply in love and finding rest for their soul.

And then it’s just finding one excuse after another about why my life can’t look like that.

So many people live as if someone else is responsible to arrange their lives correctly, as if somehow it’s okay not to make sure that my life’s running that way, because I can blame someone else for it not happening the way it ought to be.

It’s because of my boss
or my organization
or my job
or my season of life
or something else

But God will ask everyone in this room one day, “Did you abound in the work I gave you to do, and did you abide in my love?”

And when he asks that question, the giant-cat answer is not going to work.

This life is your one-and-only chance to abound in whatever it is that your hand finds for you to do, and abide in the love of a God who deeply loves you.

This leads to my third observation.

I must assess my level of abounding and abiding.

I must become the world’s leading expert at assessing how I’m doing at abounding in the work that God gives me to do, and abiding in God’s love.

It will be okay if a lot of other gauges in your life get misread. Not this one. I’ve got to be real clear on this.

And I mention this partly because people are just drifting into very destructive patterns in our society.

A doctor by the name of Meyer Friedman developed the research behind the type-A personality profile. He’s the guy who coined the phrase “hurry sickness.”

He had a very interesting career. He was actually a cardiologist. He worked with heart patients — people who suffered from heart disease.

One of the ways he and his partner discovered the type-A personality was very interesting.

Oddly enough, they contracted with an upholsterer to come in and do some work in their office, and the upholsterer commented on the very unusual pattern of wear on the chairs in the waiting room.

This upholsterer noticed that while the fabric everywhere else on the chair was like new. The fabric on the edge of the seat was completely frayed.

And Friedman realized his patients hated waiting. They were so addicted to hurry that they would literally sit on the edge of their seats in the waiting room of his office.

And it was destroying their hearts, this impatience, this hurry. It was killing them.

That’s one of the ways he was led to discover the type-A personality.

And this led to an enormous amount of research on destructive hurry.

And I want to run through a few of the indicators that destructive hurry is present in someone’s life.

1. I live with a chronic sense that there is not enough time.

No matter how fast I run, I feel like I’m always behind.
I’m always playing catch up.

Second one:

2. I live with an increased sense of irritability.

I find myself getting angrier at people… because impatient and hurried people just get angry a lot more often.
Look at any traffic jam and you’ll see this.

The third indicator of destructive hurry:

3. I live with physical tension in my body.

I find myself often drumming my fingers or bouncing my knees or tapping my toes or clenching my jaw — I live with a lack of peace in my body.
I live with neck pain or back pain or stomach pain that has to do with stress.

Next indicator is:

4. I live with a sense of being preoccupied.

This is an inability to be fully present in the moment.
I have to remind myself to keep looking someone right in the eye and listening to them.
My mind keeps wandering because there are so many things I’m juggling.
I just get preoccupied.

Next one — this is huge:

5. I live with the loss of a sense of deep gratitude and joy.

I get up in the morning and instead of being grateful, because it’s another day and it’s a gift and I get to be alive. Instead of that, I find myself just overwhelmed with all the stuff I have to do.

Next indicator:

6. I live with hurried conversations.

You find yourself talking fast.
You find yourself finishing not just your sentences, but other people’s sentences.
That’s a gift to others so they don’t have to do all that work themselves.
But they often don’t receive it as a gift from you.

Another indicator is:

7. I live with a sense of fatigue.

You just lack vitality.

Last one:

8. I live with the feeling that I’m missing out on life.

You feel that even though you keep going faster, you are somehow missing out on life.
Even though you keep trying to run harder and harder, something is slipping through your fingers, and that something is your life.

Here’s a problem. In our society, not only do we live with this kind of stuff — not only do we tolerate it, we glorify these traits.

We glorify exhaustion, fatigue, being over-scheduled, over-committed, or overworked, because these are signs that I’m an important person.
I must be worth something.
I must be climbing the ladder.
My existence is validated, because I lead an exhausted, insane pace of life.

I want to give you a way to assess the abiding-abounding factor in life. This was in a book by a guy named James Lord. And it’s a way to think about energy or your spirit and emotion life.

He says, “When it comes to Energy, there are two dimensions that you can rate it on.

Energy tends to be either High or Low.
And then, on another dimension, energy is either Positive or it’s Negative.

And this leaves you with four different quadrants.

In the top right, quadrant 1, my energy is high and it’s quite positive.

So this quadrant would be marked by words like motivated and hopeful.
When I’m in this quadrant, I find myself highly motivated to do things.
It’s a hopeful quadrant.

In the top left, quadrant 2, my energy is high and there’s lot of it, but it’s negative.

Anyone want to guess what the two dominant emotions in quadrant two are?

Fearful and Angry, because they produce a lot of energy, but it’s negative.

In the bottom left, quadrant 3, my energy is negative and it’s quite low.

There’s not much energy in this quadrant.

This quadrant would be marked by words like Depressed or Sad. You’re in this quadrant when you experience grief or loss.

In the bottom right, quadrant 4, my energy is quite low, but it’s on the positive side.

So this would be marked by words like Relaxed or Peaceful.

When I’m in this quadrant, I feel at home.

We live our lives in these four quadrants. We’re always in one of these four boxes.

Take a look at them for a moment.

Which one of these four boxes do you want to be in when you’re at work?

You shouldn’t have to think too hard about that.

I’m not asking you which one are you in when you’re at work, or which one does thinking about going to work put you in.

With all other things being equal, if you could just choose, which one of these would you like to be in when you go to work?

Which one would you like Christian, our worship pastor, to be in when he’s at work?

Quadrant one.

Let me tell you a little secret. We don’t work for money. We really don’t, ultimately.

Because again, God created us to work because we’re made in his image, because we’re made to be creative and to bless the world as God has done.

We don’t work primarily for money.

We work for the experience of being in quadrant one.
We work for that sense of exhilaration in doing good things.

One of the primary indicators of being in quadrant one is that you’re energized and have creative ideas and you make them happen, you see them realized.

You just find yourself stimulated and you think:

How can I grow?
What can I learn?
How can I improve things around here?
How could I create a more life-giving environment in my office or in my home or in my school or in my church?
How can I help someone else?
How can I encourage a coworker?
How can I motivate someone who feels defeated?
How can I take a challenging problem and figure out a way to solve it?

That’s what people do when they’re in the first quadrant.

You walk through the day, and you see opportunities and you move towards them.

We work for the experience of being in quadrant one. We need that. We were created for it. God made us for it.

But you can’t spend all of your life in quadrant one. No one can. We weren’t created for that.

And if you spend too much time in the northern quadrants — too much time in quadrant 1 or 2 — you will end up in quadrant 3.

Quadrant 2 will send you there quicker.

Now, no one wants to spend their whole life on the left quadrants. No one wants to spend all of their days on the negative side.

There are people who do spend most of their lives there though.

This is an important thing to understand about God. God does not intend the human race to live on the left side of the line.

Experiences in quadrants 2 and 3 are really kind of warning signals telling us that something is wrong and needs to be corrected. But it’s not a place for you to settle down and live.

And if you find yourself there a lot, one of the things I’d encourage you to do is just make a little drawing of this and take it with you this week, and kind of chart several hours during the day.

Every once in a while, every couple of hours, just stop and ask, “Which one of these quadrants do I find myself in right now?”

Look in your work.
Look in your home.
Look in your recreation.
Look in your relationships.

Where do you find yourself?

And remember, as you do this, God’s desire for the human race is that we find ourselves on the right side of that line.

And, in fact, the two quadrants on the right are exactly what we’ve been talking about today.

The first quadrant is Abound. That’s the abound quadrant.

And quadrant four is the Abide quadrant.

And God’s will is for our life to be lived in a kind of rhythm, where we abound in the work he has given us to do and where we abide in the love that he has for us.

But you can’t maintain life in quadrant one unless you are regularly doing things that keep you abiding with God in quadrant four.

That’s why God has a number of commands in this regard throughout Scripture.

For instance, he says, “Remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy.”

Which one of the four quadrants does the Sabbath day fit in?

Number four.

That’s an abiding day.
That’s a day that God said, “I want you to reserve to abide with me. Just be with me and know that you’re loved.”

Jesus spends virtually his whole life, if you ever study it, in the right two quadrants.

There were moments of, for instance, anger in his life when he kicked some corrupt bureaucrats out of the temple.

There were moments of great sadness in his life when he grieved the loss of a friend or when he wept over Jerusalem, or before he went to the cross.

But for the most part, Jesus spent his entire life in quadrants 1 and 4:

Abiding in God’s love.
And abounding in the work God gave for him to do.

So I need to assess how much of my life gets spent in each one of those two quadrants.

And that leads me to the last observation I want to make, which again, I’ll put in the form of a question.

What do I need in my life to abide and abound?

What are the structures or practices I need to have in place in my life to help me abound in God’s work and abide in God’s love?

Because this won’t happen automatically.

We have a chance to think about, “How am I going to structure my life during this next season of my life?”

And there have been, for people who follow Christ down through the centuries, a number of basic practices that they arrange their life around.

This is true in every century in every culture.

I just want to mention a few of those, and then we’ll be done.

The first one is Solitude

Jesus himself did this often, and his followers do as well. They set aside chunks of time where they go to be alone with God.

Do you ever get tired of how noisy our world is and how cluttered and frenzied it can be?

How are you ever going to get free of that?
How are you ever going to get free of the pressure of people at work, or people at home, or people in the media — telling you to buy more, do more, earn more, climb higher?

You see, solitude is about freedom.

When Jesus would go to be alone with the Father, then he would hear that voice say, “You are my beloved Son. In you I am well pleased.”

“Whatever everyone else thinks of you, whether the crowds are cheering for you or running away from you, whether they’re saying, ‘crown him’ or ‘crucify him,’ you are my beloved Son.”

And Jesus would abide in that love. And then he’d be free to abound in God’s work and just help people.

And his followers discovered, down through the centuries, they could never have that kind of freedom that Jesus had if they didn’t practice times of abiding in solitude with the Father.

We’ll talk more about this next week.

The second fundamental practice is what’s called the discipline of Assembly — the discipline of assembling together.

In the New Testament, the writer of Hebrews says, “Do not neglect the assembling of yourselves together to worship God and to learn together.”

We do this every Sunday — we meet here, in this room.

It’s real striking to me. The writers of Scripture say people in the early church, they devoted themselves to the apostle’s teaching.

That which Jesus taught got passed on to the apostles.
It was available to everyone.
They devoted themselves to it.
The key word there is “devote.”
They made sacrifices.
They said no to other pursuits, even though they — like us — had jobs to do, mouths to feed. They wanted to be able to play some, and they had work to do. But they devoted themselves to this.

Now, why would they devote themselves, arrange their lives around this? Because they had a lot of other things to do.

It’s because they were convinced that without a consistent, steady diet of teaching from God’s Word and worship with God’s people, they did not stand a chance of living lives that abound in God’s work and abide in God’s love.

And it’s no less true today.

So I don’t know if you’ve made this decision, if you’ve said, “I will say no to certain other pursuits, to certain other events and activities that will draw me away, and I’ll devote myself to the discipline of assembly. When the Body gathers together to open up God’s Word to learn and to worship, I want to be there for that.”

Down through the ages, followers of Christ have found that indispensable.

We need solitude time.
We need corporate learning time.

I just want to close with a word to those of you who are followers of Christ. Some of you here are exploring faith today. I’m so glad you’re here. I hope you keep exploring.

I just want to say a word, right now, to those of you who’ve already made the decision that you are a Christ follower.

I have a dream that one day, God will say to me and to you and to our church:

Blue Oaks, you abounded in my work.
You took big risks.
You dreamed great dreams.
You rolled up your sleeves and sacrificed your comfort.
You poured yourselves out like a drink offering.
You abounded in my work.

And you abided in my love.
You spent intimate time alone with me.
You devoted yourselves to gathering together to study my Word and to worship.

Blue Oaks, you abounded in my work, and you abided in my love. Great job!

I hope God says that of you one day.

It can be so if you want it.

Alright, let’s pray as the worship team comes to lead us in a closing song.