Listening to the Holy Spirit:
As a builder builds, so do I. As you are called by the Father, so I call you to My likeness. You too build. The work of your hands, when given to Me, they form through your life the things of God. As you labor in the day, your presence, if glowing with My likeness, it builds around you a masterpiece of hope and light for others. He who toils only for the wage, receives only the wage, but he who toils to sow light, grace and blessing, although his wage is earned, much more is given besides. Go to your work as My reflection. Treat those around you as I would treat them. You know My way through My Word. Seek to give the effort, beyond the natural self, that you would receive a greater wage, and those also will receive about you. The tool in your hand is My love for those you walk with. Build in them, as I build through you – both they and you.
Romans 15:1-2 (ESV) – We who are strong have an obligation to bear with the failings of the weak, and not to please ourselves. Let each of us please his neighbor for his good, to build him up.
Hebrews 10:24 (ESV) – And let us consider how to stir up one another to love and good works…
1Thessalonians 5:11 (ESV) – Therefore encourage one another and build one another up, just as you are doing.
Taking It to Work:
In March of 2008, I was invited by a business owner to join him at a weekly meeting of other business leaders that were members of an organization called FCCI. At the time, I was working as an engineer in Boulder Colorado, but was feeling lead to possibly buy this gentlemen’s business.
Well, that first FCCI meeting was a clincher. Any doubts I had about stepping out of the corporate world and entering the small business world evaporated in that ninety minute get together.
Around that table were a half dozen leaders not only discussing how to run their endeavors for success, but also, and more importantly, how to run them in such a way that it would build those up that worked with them, even more powerfully than a church could. As they saw it, their leadership roles, and their ability to lift and build those people, was there five or six days a week, where the church only had that influence a couple hours a week, and that is if those they worked with were going to church at all.
It was a great eye-opening morning for me. My whole concept of leading at work changed that day, and every day since.
I ended up buying that company, and although we’ve built millions of parts through that business, from day one, my work was not just producing parts. My leadership role, was not just about building a company, and my building, was not just a manufacturing building, but it was a place to build-up those men and women in which God had surrounded me.
You are surrounded too. You touch many lives in your work, so keep in mind, what you are working on is not the only thing you are called to build, as His Word works on you, today.
