My wife and I recently visited a church for first responders—cops, EMTs, firefighters and so on. The pastor himself a former cop preached from Colossians 3. In this chapter, Paul exhorts Christians to “put to death” sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, covetousness and idolatry. Alright, these are not commonly used words for our usual behavior, so Paul gets more specific: anger, wrath, malice (hatred), slander and obscene talk, lying. We are told to “put off the old self” and “put on the new self.” For the first responders, the pastor said, it means we are to make a deliberate choice to put on the uniform and in terms of our faith and behavior, to put Christ’s image on with compassionate hearts, kindness, humility, meekness (strength under control, as the pastor defined it) and patience, forgiveness and, above all, love “which binds everything in perfect harmony.”
Now I’ve not been a cop. I’ve had to exercise supervision over a homeless crowd, festival crowd and junior high students (perhaps the hardest to restrain). I can only imagine how tough it is: you head off to work with great intentions, putting on Christ’s image; you get to your station; go through debriefing…still bearing Christ’s heart and thinking, “Yes, I can see others as Christ sees them.” And then you hit the streets and you start getting responses from civilians that are not congruent with your intentions. You love them but they view you with fear, suspicion, annoyance, anger, etc.
It’s got to be hard. And so, I really appreciated the pastor applying this scripture to real work life. This is the only sermon I’ve heard (or I’ve forgotten some from way, way, way back before I was heavy into my business career) that dealt with work life. In this blog, I started writing a series trying to do just that: looking at scripture that should influence our business practices. I wrote two group-discussion books on the Sermon of the Mount with a focus on work (Jesus on Monday Morning); the website has a few short videos with each lesson in the first volume.
