On things above …
“You wouldn’t believe it…”
“It’s horrible!”
I sat in a fast food restaurant…
You know the one…
The one where you can order your chicken spicy or mild…
(Make mine spicy please, with a side order of beans and rice.)
She was having a conversation with her friend…
And because of the volume of her voice…
With everyone else in the restaurant too.
What terrible thing was she about to disclose to us all?
“You wouldn’t believe it,” She said again.
“Everybody prints to my printer.”
“I can’t get any work done!”
“If the company cared about us they’d buy more printers!”
I kept thinking about her conversation as I left the restaurant.
Next stop: the grocery store…
(After all, man does not live by spicy chicken alone…)
“Wait!” said a manager to a new employee…
“Here’s how you stock the shelves…”
“Look at expiration dates…”
“Rotate the stock…”
He continued with mind numbing detail about the finer points of shelf-stocking…
“You’ve got to care about how you do this job,” he was saying as I turned into the next aisle…
The store manager…
The woman in the restaurant…
You…
Me…
It’s so easy for all of us to focus our minds on what’s closest to us…
Our jobs or families or the driver who cut us off in traffic…
On earthly things…
And yet God says…
Set your minds on things above, not on earthly things. Colossians 3:2
Does that mean we can stop caring about how we do our jobs?
God says…
Serve wholeheartedly…Ephesians 6:7
How can we do both?
Maybe reading the whole verse would help…
Serve wholeheartedly, as if you were serving the Lord, not people… Ephesians 6:7
As if we were serving the lord…
If we focus on serving God…
We will look to Him for our reward…
…the Lord will reward each one for whatever good they do… Ephesians 6:8
If we look to him for our reward…
We can die with Christ to the things of the world…
Put to death, therefore, whatever belongs to your earthly nature: sexual immorality, impurity, lust, evil desires and greed, which is idolatry. Colossians 3:5
We can truly set our minds and hearts on things above …
Since, then, you have been raised with Christ, set your hearts on things above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God… Colossians 3:1
Where Christ resides…
Where we long to be with Him…
…to live is Christ and to die is gain. Philippians 1:21
