Is it?

Not so fast.

God looks on the heart and not the outward appearance.

What does He see there?

The Administrator’s Heart
Well, he sees that you start your day with prayer as you go to the office. You ask Him to protect you in your travels. You praise Him for safely navigating you through the rush hour.

You sit at your desk and begin the mindless filing, but as you do so, you are praying for family and friends.

You are interrupted by a boring colleague, but you cheerfully bear with him, listen to His moaning, try to cheer him up, and send him away with a bit of a spring in his step.

You sit down for coffee break, and bow your head for a few seconds of thanksgiving.

You pray for the Lord’s help to make that difficult phone call to a bad debtor. He yells and screams at you again, but you sense the Lord’s help as He gives you patience, self-control, gentleness, and peace. Slowly, your soft answer turns away wrath, and a few days later, the long-promised check appears.

Later in the day, you are putting the stamps on the mail, and praying for the Lord’s blessing on the day’s work, that the company would prosper, and that God would give harmony among the workers.

You leave work thanking God for His help throughout the day, thanking Him for a steady income, and asking God to bless your witness.

Then God looks at the pastor in his office.

The Minister’s Heart
There’s certainly a lot of hustle and bustle there. He’s reading furiously and typing even more furiously. He lost a couple of hours aimlessly surfing the Internet this morning, and a few more hours in a heated online debate about the millennium. Now he’s up against the clock as he tries to get a sermon together. But he’s done it many times before. He knows the websites to look at, he’s a skilled cutter-and-paster, and by the end of the day he’s got a fairly polished sermon constructed. He picks the songs he knows that everyone likes, and assures himself that after all these years in the ministry, he can easily lead the worship. Now back to the TV.

And sure enough, Sunday comes, he struts his stuff, everybody praises him, and he goes home, not to fall on his knees, but to start reading that latest book from Amazon.

Not one prayer. Not one contact with heaven. Not one act of dependence. Not one thanksgiving. Not one call to God.

Who’s pleasing God?
Now, you tell me, who’s pleasing God?

You do all that you do each day and no one praises you or encourages you or thinks you are particularly godly. The pastor comes and does his thing and everyone swoons. You go back to work on Monday without all that encouragement and affirmation, yet you patiently persevere in your calling.

Now, you tell me, who’s pleasing God?

If you do your work in dependence upon God, looking to Him alone for guidance, protection, strength, and blessing, you are doing your job with more faith than some men in pulpits!

If we preach about faith without faith, it is impossible to please God (Heb. 11:6). But if we file papers in faith, drive trucks in faith, paint walls in faith, and dust the house in faith, God not only delights in us but rewards us too (Heb. 11:6).

What springs to mind when you hear that word?

Pressure? Smarmy? Slick? Greedy? Artificial?

“Oh, I want my daughter to be a salesperson!” What no parent has ever said.

Ever heard a sermon that called young people to a life of selling?

But why not? Is selling incompatible with Christian faith? Is “Christian salesman” a contradiction?

Selling by serving
A major pharmaceutical company asked Lisa Erle Mcleod to shadow hundreds of their sales people to find out out what makes the difference between an average salesperson  and a top performer. (Listen to Lisa’s interview on the EntreLeadership Podcast, Selling by Serving).

She didn’t know the sales figures of each salesperson, but after two days with one women, Mcleod was sure she’d found one of the stars. When this woman walked into doctor’s offices, the receptionists stopped what they were doing and ran to get the doctors! Not a common reaction to most drug sales reps!

When they parted at Phoenix airport, Mcleod wanted to get inside her head a bit and asked her: “What do you think about when you go on sales calls.”

The rep looked around the car as if someone else was listening, in a kind of conspiratorial, “I’m going to tell you the big secret right now.”

The Big Secret
“I don’t tell many people this. But I always think of this one patient. When I first started this job, I was in the waiting room, waiting on one of my doctors, and this little old lady comes up to me, taps me on the shoulder and says: ‘Excuse me, are you the rep that sells this drug?’”

“Yes, Mam, I am.”

“The little old lady turned to me and said: ‘I just want to thank you. Before I started taking this I didn’t have a life. I couldn’t go anywhere. I couldn’t travel. Now I can go and visit my grandchildren, I can get down on the floor and play with them.’”

This high-powered corporate sales rep started crying, “I think about her every day and that’s my purpose.”

Despite being initially focused on lots of other technical data and stats, Macleod was sure she’d stumbled on the magic ingredient. She went back through hundreds of interviews, and found seven reps who all alluded to a sense of purpose.

At the end of the study, the pharmaceutical company asked her to identify the top reps. “These seven,” she said. And she was 100% correct. “And I know your top performer too!” Right again. The Phoenix saleswoman as the company’s top sales rep three years in a row in the entire country.

Noble Purpose
Mcleod’s conclusion was that the way to increase revenue was not so much behavioral – train reps to write better letters, make more phone calls, do better presentations. It was much more about motivation and attitude. Sales people who had a sense of noble purpose, who truly wanted to make a difference for their customers, drove more revenue than sales people that are focused on quota. 

It’s that sense of noble purpose – how can I make a difference to my customers – that can make selling a glorious and God-glorifying Christian vocation.

But that’s equally true of all vocations, including pastoring, preaching, blogging, etc. We can tell when someone is blogging just to increase their page views. We can tell when a pastor is motivated numbers in the pew or dollars in the bank. We can tell when a preacher is just out for his own glory.

But we can also tell when a pastor, a blogger, a sales person, a home-maker, a painter, etc., is motivated by service, is energized by making a beneficial difference to others’ lives. And that’s not only noble. It’s beautiful.

What’s your noble purpose in your daily work?

Selling by Serving, An Entreleadership Podcast.

Selling with Noble Purpose, book by Lisa Erle Mcleod

Similarly, we do this with labor when we divide headwork from handwork, and then attribute huge value to headwork and little or nothing to handwork. Sometimes we use economic criteria (which job earns the most?), and sometimes we use spiritual criteria (ministry is spiritual, everything else is secular).

Using biblical criteria I want to show why this divide-and devalue assessment of work is wrong, and I also want to demonstrate the beauty and dignity of manual labor.

The Source of Manual Labor
God was the first manual laborer. He created all the materials in the world and worked them into shape. He made Adam from dust, and Eve from a male rib. He made things out of things.

Also, the first job God created was gardening, into which He called His first “employees.” Later, He called Bezalel and gifted him with all the necessary manual skills to build the tabernacle. Indeed, Bezalel is the first person Scripture records as being filled with the Spirit, and this filling was to help him build the Tabernacle (Ex. 31:3). God called and equipped Bezalel, no less than He called Moses.

The Son of God was probably a carpenter for most of His early life, a job to which He was divinely called and for which He was divinely gifted. Matthew Henry said: “Skill in common arts and employments is the gift of God; from him are derived both the faculty and the improvement of the faculty.”

The Range of Manual Labor
We find a variety of God-given gifts at the tabernacle building site: woodworking, stone-cutting, jewel-setting, needle-working, etc.

Do we not see God’s amazing creativity in the vast range of creative gifts He has distributed throughout the world? When we watch a farmer plough his fields, a builder erect a wall, a homemaker arrange and adorn her house, we see the vast range of God’s creative abilities scattered throughout His creation. John Calvin said, “All the arts come from God and are to be respected as divine inventions.”

The Necessity of Manual Labor
Moses was a knowledge worker, but not a manual worker. God gave him the ability to teach and write, but he needed help with practical matters of construction. For God’s purposes to be accomplished, for His character to be revealed through the tabernacle, He also needed those who could work with their hands (which, as Exodus 35:31 makes clear, also involved a lot of headwork).

If God has gifted you, it’s because He has ordained needs for you to meet with your gifts. If He’s given you Bezalel-type gifts, don’t try to be a Moses. And if you have Moses-type gifts, encourage and value the Bezalels. The Church and the world both need all of God’s gifts.

The Beauty of Manual Labor
In the Tabernacle, we see God’s regard and concern for beauty. We see it in the design, the fascinating furniture and ornaments, and the value and variety of the materials. Although a large part of the Tabernacle’s design was about daily practicalities, some of the design choices were simply about beauty.

Let’s image our God by cultivating an appreciation for beauty and by displaying it in our daily lives and callings. Ask: “How can I make this home or yard more beautiful, this factory more beautiful, this product more beautiful? How can I reveal and display the beauty of God in my daily life and calling?” Our beautiful God loves beauty.

The Aim of Manual Labor
The aim of handwork and headwork, is the glory of God. Moses’ preaching and Bezalel’s cutting, nailing, and lifting resulted in God being better known.

But, you may ask, “How do I glorify God in a factory, in a building site, in the kitchen?” We do so by mirroring God through diligence, integrity, honesty, and, above all, by aiming at excellence in all that we do.

That’s why, like Bezalel, we all need the filling of the Holy Spirit in whatever we do. Work is difficult, excellent work is even more difficult, and doing God-glorifying excellent work is most difficult of all. But if we do our God-given work, with God’s help, and for God’s glory, we are worshipping Him in, through, and with our work.

And that’s beautiful!

First published in the November 2012 edition of Tabletalk. Subscribe here for $23 per year.