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Matthew: How do I honor God with my words? The answer to that and other questions on Key Life. Key Life exists to communicate that the deepest message of Jesus and the Bible is the radical grace of God to sinners and sufferers. Life’s hard for everyone, so grace is for all of us. But there’s a lot of confusion about how grace applies to real life. So here are seminary professor and author Steve Brown and Pete Alwinson from Forge Truth to answer your questions.

Steve Brown: Thank you, Matthew. Hey, Pete.

Pete Alwinson: Happy Friday.

Steve Brown: Happy Friday to you. And it is, because we're no longer a pastor.

Pete Alwinson: Pray for your pastor. He's got to gear up for Sunday.

Steve Brown: Every Friday when I was a pastor was Black Friday, because that's when my hard time began to take place. In fact, there was demonic, I didn't realize it so much, but there was depression when I was preparing sermons. And my wife recognized that. And she would see I was down, and I often was on Friday and Saturday. She would start talking about Jesus.

And when she talked about Jesus, I literally would feel the darkness lift. So, it's Friday and we don't even have to work or look forward to Sunday because we're doing fine since we don't have to preach every Sunday. That's crazy. By the way, Pete comes in every Friday. Check out forgetruth.com.

And we answer questions together, and we've been doing it for a lot of years. And we love your questions. You can ask a question 24/7 simply by picking up the phone and dialing 1-800-KEY-LIFE (539-5433). Or you can send your question to Key Life Network, Post Office Box 5000, Maitland, Florida 32794.

If you live in Canada, it's Key Life Canada, Post Office Box 28060, Waterloo, Ontario N2L 6J8. And you can, of course, anytime email a question to steve@keylife.org. And if you can, those are good places where you can do it. Help us financially, because when you help us, you help so many others that can't help financially.

So be generous and I promise we'll be faithful with your gift. We'll squeeze every dime for the glory of God. And if you can't help us financially, we understand. Do say a prayer for this ministry. Pete, why don't you say a prayer for this Q&A and then we'll get to the question.

Pete Alwinson: Let's do. Absolutely, that's great. Our great Father, we do come to you on this Friday at the end of this week, and we pause just for a minute to remember who we are in you and who you are. We honor you, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. And Lord, how easy it is for us to take you for granted. I don't know why that is, Lord. It's our sin, I guess, but Lord we come to you and we recognize that you are kind and good and loving and powerful and holy.

And we pause in your presence and we lift up your divine attributes and how you have revealed them to us in what you've made and in what you have done to redeem us. Lord Jesus, thank you for being the Savior. Holy Spirit, the one who takes the work of Christ accomplished on our behalf and communicating that into our hearts, giving us the ability to believe and follow you, we honor you.

Lord, you know the needs we have at the end of this week, though, as we recognize that we're your children, we also recognize we have so many needs—financially, emotionally, health-wise. Lord, oh, those who are listening, many need healing and help with their health. And Lord, we come to you for all of that. You know what we need, and so we come to you.

Meet us, Lord, through these requests, but also then we pray this weekend that you'd meet us through our pastors and priests and teachers and leaders. Use them in a powerful way to communicate your word and grace to us as we worship. Be honored and glorified now, we pray in Jesus' name. Amen.

Steve Brown: Amen. Pete, I have a couple of email questions, and both of them have to do with work. I thought it'd be good if we dealt with both of these. The first one is this: how do I honor the Lord in my work or my career?

Pete Alwinson: That's good. That's great. I love it. At Forge, we talk about our identity in Christ—a grace-based identity as the deeply beloved, redeemed sons and daughters of the Most High God. And then we talk about purpose. And we talk about how purpose has three elements God has given us as men in particular, but women too. We're leaders, worker-providers, and warrior-ambassadors of the gospel.

And so work is key to the roles and the purposes that God has given us. And so that question presupposes that we should honor God in our work. And a Christian is really the only one that's going to even have that conclusion. So, this is crucial.

Steve Brown: It's so good. We kind of think that people like us who are ordained have a ministry, but if you're a teacher, that's different. Or if you are a professor or a doctor or garbage collector or a lawn maintenance guy, that's not the same thing. But they're wrong.

Pete Alwinson: They're wrong because we unwittingly make a big distinction between the sacred and the secular. If our purpose is to lead and work and advance the gospel warrior on in the—well, it's all to the glory of God. And of course we have scripture for that. Whatever you do, whether you eat or drink, do all to the glory of God.

So, how do you do that then? How do you honor God as a landscaper or as a teacher? Well, part of that's excellence, isn't it? I love it. Doing good work because we do our work heartily unto the Lord, not to men. Our first client is God, right? So if I'm a plumber, I better do a darn good job, not just so that I get called back and have to fix it, but that I honor God.

Steve Brown: And if I'm a businesswoman or a businessman, exactly. That's my ministry.

Pete Alwinson: Same thing. If I'm a nurse, why should I be kind to my patients? To glorify God, to honor God first and then of course to help people.

Steve Brown: Such good stuff. All right, the second one: is it sinful for Christians to work on Sunday and how do we define work?

Pete Alwinson: I know, good question. What do you think? I wrote next to my notes on that, that's a really good question. I don't think we think about it. I would say work, at one level, is simply doing legal activity that creates an income for us. Okay, that's one thing.

Another way of looking at that is looking at work as to tend the culture that God has made. Just like Adam was to tend the garden, we have to develop this world in which he's given us. And so tending the culture, providing good in the culture. Somebody that does landscaping or plumbing, they're actually tending the culture there. They're helping people and helping people have a better life. So I would say that comprises work, those clarifications. There's probably a better way of looking at it.

Steve Brown: No, there isn't. I mean, that is as good as anything I've ever heard. Okay, what about doing it on Sunday?

Pete Alwinson: You're going to hell. Well, that was short and right to the point. One of the things is that we had lived in a culture one time where what you just said wasn't a joke. Sabbath keeping was made the center of everything we did. And we forgot that the Sabbath was a gift. God said sit down and be quiet and shut up and think about me a little bit and all I've done for you.

This is the gift I give to you. Every week, one of those days is for you to rest because you're a workaholic and you're going to kill yourself and your family. That's what the Sabbath thing is. It's not a legal thing that you make such a big deal out of, but important.

It really is. In the Old Testament, it was one of the signs of the covenant of grace. I redeemed you out of Egyptian bondage, and I created you, so Sabbath and remember that I rested on the seventh day. So rest, but I also redeemed you out of Egyptian bondage. And so a day of rest.

I think in one sense, the New Testament would say that the Sabbath is fulfilled by the work of Christ. And so we don't see it as Christians in particular as they did in the Old Testament times. But the one in seven day of worship is important. And so I think we need to get back to that and see it as a gift. But if your donkey falls into a pit, get it out of the pit. You've got to milk the cows, milk the cows. There are some things we need to do.

Steve Brown: Sure. This is an interesting question: what do you think about the stations of the cross, especially in a Presbyterian church?

Pete Alwinson: What do you think about that? Because you've done it.

Steve Brown: I think they're good ways to meditate. I used to stop at a chapel on the way to work sometimes early. It was a Catholic chapel and I'd just walk in the garden behind it, which had the stations of the cross. And it was a good thing. It was a positive thing.

Basically, a Catholic practice, but if your Presbyterian pastor has set up the stations of the cross in his church, he's braver than I am. Boy, you talk about getting criticized for stuff, I'll bet you'd be criticized for it.

Pete Alwinson: Bet you would. I think that many Catholic practices are helpful for meditation and thinking through the aspects of the gospel and the work of Christ on our behalf. And that can be a positive thing. Now if you do them thinking that you're going to accrue or gain merit to add to your salvation, to add to the work of Christ, forget it because that's not what that's for.

Steve Brown: And I don't know about that. For instance, Veronica's handkerchief is a part of that, and that's not a particularly biblical event as described in the Bible. But nevertheless, even that causes us to focus on Jesus who died in our place for our sins. Amen. Amen.

Guys, we got to get out of here. Hope you're going to have a great weekend. And thanks for joining us each Friday for this Q&A. And I have one other thing to say and then we're history. Key Life is a listener-supported production of Key Life Network.