Serving with Soul

Something's getting lost in the translation.

Several years ago when I served as a minister in New York, our church offered a class in evangelism training. A woman misunderstood and got upset; she couldn't figure out why any church would sponsor a class on vandalism training.

During a mission trip to Mexico, I couldn't understand why the street vendor grew frustrated with me when I tried to buy a bottle of Coca Cola with a handful of large coins. With my limited grasp of Spanish, I finally realized I was offering only about one-tenth of the money required to buy a Coke. Even in an English-speaking nation like Australia, I was puzzled by the different names my friends gave to familiar items. They called a sidewalk a "footpath," gasoline "petrol," and American football "gridiron." In cross-cultural situations, things can get lost in the translation.

And so can what we do at church if we don't translate it into our lives during the week. Sometimes the world of worship and the world of work seem like two alien cultures, and it's hard to see how they intersect. We may enjoy spending an hour or two in a stained-glass subculture on Sunday with our Bible-toting friends, but how will God's love affect the way we treat the lunchbox/toolbox/briefcase-toting crowd with whom we spend 40 hours a week? How do those Sunday morning smiles, sermons, handshakes, and prayers translate into the workplace on Tuesday afternoon?

Part of the problem is an unrealistic view of the Bible. It's easy to see Bible characters as larger than life—as if they sat around in undistracted bliss, somehow insulated from the pressures of daily work. But Abraham and Sarah didn't exercise faith in a vacuum; their lives were complicated by risky moves, a long-term struggle with infertility, squabbles with neighbors, and the responsibility of managing a large and growing agricultural enterprise. Paul preached, but he also made tents and "worked night and day in order not to be a burden to anyone" (1 Thessalonians 2:9).

The people we meet in Scripture worked in a wide variety of occupations: carpenters, musicians, tailors, artists, homemakers, teachers, stonecutters, tax collectors, soldiers, farmers, merchants, fishermen, business managers, innkeepers, physicians, government employees, and others. Real-life folks like these were instructed in Scripture, "Whatever you do, do it all for the glory of God" (1 Corinthians 10:31). God's Word doesn't create an artificial distinction between the sacred and the secular. Since God calls us to be holy in all we do (1 Peter 1:15), faith fits in the marketplace as well as in the church building. It doesn't matter whether we're the boss or the bossed, whether our collars are blue or white; God calls us all to work hard and "never tire of doing what is right" (2 Thessalonians 3:13).

Something's lost in the translation if we separate our Christian ethics from our business ethics, or if we speak "believerese" on Sunday and use profanity the other six days of the week. And something's wrong if we make no effort to communicate with non-Christians in the vast mission field of human need we call the factory, the office, the store, and the school.

Faith in Christ can transform even the most slavish task when you remember to do the will of God "from your heart" and "serve wholeheartedly, as if you were serving the Lord, not men" (Ephesians 6:6, 7). The Greek word translated "heart" in verse 6 is psuche, the word for "soul" or "life."

Christ's lordship needs to permeate our lives so thoroughly that we serve him with soul—even on Tuesday afternoon.