Home : Transformation :
Articles
Articles of Interest from the Body of Christ
Partnership with Jesus in the Workplace
By Gary Wiens
Intimacy for Task Oriented People
God wants to partner with you in your workplace, marriage, family - in every aspect of your life, not "to get things done", but to develop intimate friendship with you. I am becoming more convinced than ever that Jesus is building a partnership, an intimate friendship with the people that he loves (you!) for the purpose of manifesting his Kingdom and managing the universe. What a stunning privilege.
Yet all too often in our busy lives getting things done takes priority, and we guiltily add "relationship with God" to the "to do" list, and miss the love relationship it was all supposed to be about.
The Right Foundations
To grow in the intimacy with God we desire, we first need to check the foundations of what we believe about him and the way he operates. These are three keys to friendship with God that I want to lay out are the basis for this teaching:
The goal in the heart of God is intimacy - God is fundamentally relational and He is love.
Love demands an object; amazingly that is us, through Jesus. By intimacy I mean spiritual
and emotional closeness that is characterized by transparency.
- Mutual self-disclosure - transparency means that God comes as he is to the table, his ultimate self-revelation being the person of Jesus and the pinnacle of his disclosure, the Cross. He then asks us to come as we are, Hebrews 4:16 "Let us then approach the throne of grace with confidence..." Not in a posturing way, holding up our resume and accomplishments to God, but coming confident in His mercy that I can show him who I really am - mess and all. As Psalm 33 says, the eyes of God search the earth for people like this who will trust in his mercy.
- Posture of receptivity - this is how the heroes of the faith learned to come to the Lord: Samuel "speak Lord for your servant is listening", Isaiah "morning by morning he wakens my ear to listen", Mary "be it unto me according to your will" even Jesus "I have come not to my will, but the will of him who sent me."
How does this become reality in the Marketplace?
Mostly Martha
We mostly live busy, task-oriented lives in the marketplace and are caught in a Mary/Martha double-bind, feeling condemned that we're not more like Mary who chooses to wait before Jesus and misunderstanding that God actually created Martha to be as she was - a task-oriented person.
The Lord's criticism of Martha was not that she wasn't like Mary, but that she was confused with the order of things. Secondary things, like tasks, came first and expanded to fill her time so that there was no longer room for "first things" - intimacy with Jesus.
I believe that it's the few who are created to be like Mary, completely giving their lives seated at the feet of Jesus in intercession. Most of us are created like Martha, to partner with God in his works.
Ephesians 2:10 "For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them."
In other words He created us with great care and with specific activity and tasks in mind, and he intended for us to walk in the performance of these tasks. As task-oriented people, we have been woven around a particular dimension of the nature of God in Christ Jesus, designed to fulfill that part of His nature.
The challenge is to learn from the Lord's gentle rebuke and redirecting of Martha - to put first the first thing of loving him, spending time with him and being in that place of mutual self-disclosure, so that we can live out our identity as task-oriented people with effectiveness - because we are then truly able to partner with God.
Partnership - For Love's Sake
God chooses to accomplish his purposes in the earth through flesh, our flesh. The ultimate enactment and forerunner of this was Jesus, and today God says that He has things He wants to do in the business world - in our workplaces, in the educational/medical/political/governmental realms and He wants us to partner with Him - because of love and a desire for relationship with you.
Let us understand - God does not need our help, but He does desire our friendship. Partnering with him in tasks develops intimacy. Of course God could work in a sovereign, "zapping" kind of way, but his remarkable, vulnerable act of involving us in the process draws our hearts in love.
Woundedness, often rooted in childhood, can lead us to invert the partnership and try to gain approval from God through our performance. That was never God's intention. As Ephesians 3 states, security in the love of the Father is supposed to be our root system, not a target we aim for. From that place He can reveal his secrets to us, and we get to experience the glory of working together with him. Partnering with our Father, partnering with our Beloved, we get to see the Kingdom of God unfold.
The God of Hide and Seek
Proverbs 25:2 "It is the glory of God to conceal a matter, but the glory of kings is to search out a matter."
We need to get a new perspective on what God is like in his ways - he loves discovery, he loves puzzles and concealing himself that we might be drawn deeper to find him. His delight is self-disclosure - in the secret place. God knows much more about our businesses than we do, and yet I believe he often conceals it, not in a stingy, selfish way but because his secrets are precious and only found by those who will search them out. It is the place of intimacy and worship that is the place of revelation.
When my son was small he longed for a dog. So one day he comes home to find a note pinned to the front door directing him to another place in the house. There he finds another note, this time wrapped around a dog biscuit and giving him a clue to find the next spot. There he finds a dog leash, with another note and so on around the house - all the time I see his heart grow in excitement, delight, anticipation and the joy and glory of discovering what his heart longed for. This is just a little picture of the process God is inviting us into to partner with him in finding his answers for the issues in our businesses and lives.
How Do We Go Forward?
Practically then, what are the steps we can take to align ourselves with these truths on a daily basis?
Personal worship - our devotional life of loving Jesus must take first place in our lives. With the first thing first, all else follows. Two excellent ways of entering into this place of intimate worship are:
- Meditate on the attributes of God and His Son Jesus Christ. Let His character and nature become the focus of your study and prayer life.
- Personalize the statements of blessing and affection for His people, for example, Psalms 106:4-5. "Remember me, O LORD, with the favor You have toward Your people. Oh, visit me with Your salvation, that I may see the benefit of Your chosen ones, that I may rejoice in the gladness of Your nation, that I may glory with Your inheritance."
It is in the place of intimate worship that we then inquire about the task: "Lord what are we doing today, what secrets have you hidden in your heart concerning this thing?" This is not asking for a job description to earn affection; it rather becomes a joint effort to be accomplished in the context of affection.
It's about putting first things first, not a complicated set of principles. It's about the cultivation of intimacy and the fulfillment of the task becoming one thing - sons and daughters managing the estate with the Father, walking it out arm in arm in a delightful relationship of rest and revelation. May it be so!
