Ken Boa Reflections Ministries

Guest (Male): You won't be able to think sin, and whatever you desire will be pleasing to him. Number one. Number two, your capacity in an unfallen world where space and time cooperate with you and serve you rather than going against you is such that you'll be able to think of a thing and order it and make it so. It's going to be very rich and very profound, better than you can imagine. The most fun...

Dr. Ken Boa: The key principle in the book of Ephesians is that who we are in Christ should be the basis for what we do. The whole first half of Ephesians is emphasizing your position in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, that you are a spiritual being having an earth-bound, embodied experience for a few decades max.

You're here in a soul-forming world to prepare you, just as your first world was for biological life—the womb world, as I call it. Your second world is this world, and this is soul world, let's call it. It's a soul-forming world in which you already are perfect in your spirit, but now you have to become more and more in your soul.

What is your soul? Your mind, your will, your emotions, your aspirations, your desires—all those things. Our practice is to become more like who we already are in our position. The basis for all of this is the wealth and the walk. One way of looking at this concept is to see that our identity in Christ—what God has done in us and for us and through us—is the foundation for the walk.

There's a going back and forth between this position in Christ and then living it out in your practice. It's an inside-out process that should continue to reinforce itself. In our outline of Ephesians, we've talked about the calling of the body and now the conduct of the body. We've talked about unity and diversity in the body of Christ through the Holy Spirit's gifting.

We saw that we're called to put off the old self and to put on the new because you now are a new person in Christ. You are to walk in the power of the Spirit, not grieve the Spirit, and to walk as children of light and be filled with the Spirit. We looked at that material in chapter five—walking as children of light and becoming more and more in your practice who you already are in your position.

Then we looked at the idea of wives' submission to their husbands, but husbands loving their wives. It's a mutual submission that we observe. It's not one or the other, but both submit to the needs of the other. They put the other person first, so it's not a question of what about me or what about you, but what about us?

The "us" is the third person, just as you can imagine the Holy Spirit being when you have the Father and the Son in the Divine Trinity. The lover is the Father, the beloved is the Son, and the love that flows between the Father and the Son is the Holy Spirit because it requires more than one person for there to be love. You have to have an "I-Thou."

In the richness of the Divine Trinity, this "us"—this Holy Spirit—is a growing person. Karen and I were talking about the first time when we realized that's the person for me. I took a photograph of the moment. It was a strange thing on a particular date in Manhattan. We went off to this Off-Off-Broadway production of *A Midsummer Night's Dream*.

This was in 1967, so you can imagine all the psychedelics and so forth. You had Puck flying around on the stage. It was crazy stuff, but it was a really clever thing. It started off with the incidental music, it turned dark, then a Wurlitzer jukebox turned on, a record went down, and it started playing that incidental music. It was a fun time we shared, goofy and fun.

I took a photograph. I remember exactly what she wore—the exact outfit. I told her that was the time I photographed that moment where we came to know each other. That was the "us" as it was immature, but it's grown and grown over the years. There's been a depth and a maturity to that "us" that continues to grow.

We've been talking about the husband-wife relationship and the fact that it's a mutual submission to the needs of the other person. The mystery of marriage is the one plus one equals one. His purpose in his bride is that he not only purchased his bride, but he redeemed her, he pursues her, he protects her, and he provides for her. It's a romance.

We, male and female, are part of the bride of Christ, which feels odd for a man to think of himself as part of the bride. But in comparison with his greater masculinity, he is the one who protects, provides, and pursues, and we are the ones who receive. There's a reciprocal relationship there. Because it's God and not just two humans, the bride must be purified and perfected to become like the one she's embracing and will marry.

He wants to present the church to himself in all her glory, having no spot or wrinkle or any such thing, but that she would be holy and blameless. It's this kind of love that is other-centered and seeks the need of the other person. He loves his wife and sacrifices himself. This goes back to the Genesis 2 account before the fall.

The husband is to be a leader in love, and she is to respond to that leadership. We talked as well about children. In Hebrews chapter 12, God trains us. The word *paideia* is used here, and it means not punishing us, but he trains us. He builds us up. All discipline seems not to be pleasant but painful, but afterward, for those who have it, the peaceful fruit of righteousness is what it produces in us.

It's a training in righteousness. It's not just a punishment, but it is to be other-centered and to give the child boundaries and consequences. They are trained to begin to realize they are becoming the kind of person they were called to be. They're already part of the family, and now they are to become like us in all those respects. Do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord.

The last part we're going to have next week is talking about the armor of God. But this time, I thought we'd zoom in more specifically on this passage concerning slaves and masters. The equivalent today would be employee-employer relationship. Sometimes it seems to be the same thing, but nevertheless, what is the relationship and what's a biblical philosophy of work?

How often do you ever hear about a philosophy of work—why go to work? I'm going to give it to you. It's more than stewardship, although that's a part of it, but it's a whole philosophy of work. Doing the will of God, but not by way of eyeservice as men-pleasers, but as slaves of Christ doing the will of God from the heart. Their service to their master, even in this case in slavery, would be their service to Christ.

Knowing whatever good thing each one does, he'll receive back from the Lord, whether slave or free. Masters, do the same things to them, and give up threatening, knowing that both their Master and yours is in heaven, and there's no partiality with him. I thought it would be a great thing to have a biblical view of work.

I want to talk about work and who God is. I want to talk about work and who I am. Then I'll talk about work and how I think, and then what I do. This is a very careful order. You start with God first. That's how you always build it. I do the same thing with leadership. Let's say a particular area of leadership—integrity.

We would always start with integrity and who God is. Then secondly, the next day would be the integrity in who I am. Then the next day would be integrity in how I think, and then fourthly, what I do. Notice it starts from the *imago Dei* and then it goes with us—being, knowing, and doing. Heart, head, and hands. Inside-out. It's very deliberate.

If we start with work and who God is, immediately when we look at the scriptures, we see that work is not a result of the fall. It was something that we were called to do. In fact, it was part of God's created order for humanity. They were to till the ground and to cultivate it. That's the whole idea: you're to take this and you're to be a sub-creator, as it were. It's part of your created order.

Work is patterned after God himself, as we can see in the scriptures, because he himself in six days created the heavens and the earth, and then on the seventh day, he rested. It's patterned after God himself, and it reveals his own character. Jesus describes himself as having come to accomplish the works of the Father.

He's a worker. We see ourselves always then as people who have an occupation that's designed to be an expression of the image of God in our own life journey. The Father gives us work to accomplish during our earthly sojourn. The scriptures emphasize this. We have been prepared beforehand for good works, and he empowers us to do that. Furthermore, he's appointed us over the works of his hands.

He's given us this dominion and authority from Genesis chapter 1. We have been given something more than other creatures have because we have a higher capacity, a greater image of God. I speak about animals—they can be intentional, but we are imaginative. No animal can do that. But there's another step beyond that when we are in our resurrected body. I'll call that illuminative.

You'll have a consciousness that will be so vast that you'll look back and realize you never knew. I think we'll all have flat foreheads in our resurrection body, saying "How did I miss that?" It'll all be manifested to us. You will know as you are known. These are amazing implications of the resurrected consciousness. We're living in a divine comedy. We're living in a tragedy right now, it would appear, in this third act of terrible tragedy, but there's another act to come.

We're called to please God, even in this very brief existence, by bearing fruit in every good work. He's called us to bear fruit so that your life can matter. No matter what your condition is, you can serve people, and your service to others is your service to Jesus. If you don't so much try to curry favor with them, but if your service is to be pleasing to him, all things being equal, it'll be better than if you were doing it to try to please and impress people.

It has more integrity than that. It has a greater understanding of what that is. We see that our work will be tested as well, and the scriptures emphasize it will be rewarded by God. We are really doing this as a stewardship for another who will hold us in account. We must work for the food which endures to eternal life. It's not just something that you're doing just to make a living. It's an expression of the identity that you've been granted in Christ Jesus.

Work and who I am—there's a reason why women live longer than men. When work is done in and for the Lord, it benefits others and honors God. It has a way of benefiting others because it has an integrity to it. Do it for the Lord, and it'll be better than if you did it to impress people. The quality of your work is done before the heart of God.

It's in creative activity that you and I get to externalize our identities as people made in God's image. He doesn't want us to be idle; he wants us to express that. It can be the work of our hands in any number of ways. It can be craftsmanship or many capacities and talents and hobbies. That's also an expression of creative endeavor before God.

Our identity transcends our work. It's not your work that defines you; you get to define your work. If you don't define it, it'll define you. You have to decide who defines you. You bring this identity as a follower of Jesus who is in this world to accomplish something that's going to have eternal impact.

We must derive our identity from our relationship with the Lord and not from your work. Otherwise, it'll be a thin basis for identity because what happens if I get laid off or things don't go well? Your identity is more stable than the circumstances of this world. You bring this transcendent identity in Christ.

How we are secure in him because he's adopted us into his family. How we also have a sense of significance because we belong to a body of believers that's going to go on forever. We also have a sense of satisfaction because he's given us the capacity to do something that will last forever. What you do in the Spirit will endure.

Your identity—you bring that identity and the work becomes a context in which you express that identity. True importance is not found in position or in prestige, but rather in how our work is done and in the audience for whom we do that work. You do your work with diligence as unto the Lord and playing as unto the Lord rather than for men.

When you do that, your work will be far better because we know from scripture: let not the mighty man boast of his might, and the wise man of his wisdom, and the wealthy man of his wealth, but let him who boasts boast in this: that he understands and knows me, that I am the Lord who exercises lovingkindness and justice and righteousness.

Boast in that. It's in your relationship. You're not defined by wisdom and power or wealth. That's what people go for, but you have a higher calling than those things. Otherwise, you'll be driven and not called. You want to be a person who's called by Christ. The film I use whenever I teach the contrast between being a man who is driven and a man who is called is *Chariots of Fire*.

If you haven't seen that film, you should see it. It turned out to be an honoring film that honored the gospel. If you've seen it, see it again. It bears repetition. But the contrast between Harold Abrahams, who is a Jewish student at Cambridge around 1924, and Eric Liddell is clear. Abrahams feels the anti-Semitism; it's obvious by people's responses to him.

He's an athlete, a runner, and he's a good one. He's disciplined. But his desire—he's driven, and his drivenness is "I'm going to prove them. I'll show them who I am. I'm going to run them off their feet." He's driven to prove that he does amount to something. It's a dangerous ambition because drivenness doesn't satisfy.

Harold Abrahams is contrasted by Eric Liddell, the flying Scotsman, who tells his sister Jenny that God made him for a purpose. He made him for China, but he also made him fast, and when he runs, he feels his pleasure. To give it up would be to dishonor God. It's not just games; to win is to honor him. When he runs, he feels the pleasure of God.

This is why I ask people to ask this question of themselves: What is it that when you do it, you sense the pleasure of God? It's a good diagnostic question because God can give you pleasure and you sense his pleasure in your doing that for which you were called. You have a dignity and a thing that's powerful.

Significance is not determined by that but by your relationship with God. You bring that meaning to the marketplace. It's always as well a mistake to compare ourselves with others. Comparison is a loser's game because comparison is the enemy of contentment. If you compare downward, you get cocky and arrogant. If you compare upward, you feel inadequate and inferior.

Better to fix your eyes on Jesus, not the other runners, so that you'll finish your race well. Don't compare them. What is that to you? You follow me. Never compare yourself. Looking to customers or clients as your source of provision would incline you to manipulate and use them rather than to minister to them.

If I conclude that my customers and my clients are my source of provision, I will be committed to manipulating them because they're the vehicle that I'm going to use to get my provision. But if on the other hand—this is a very profound principle and many never get it—if on the other hand I see that they are not my source of provision, it's God that I look to as my source.

They may be an agent through which God mediates that provision, but it's not even their guarantee. You're called to do your work with excellence regardless of whether that works out with that person. Therefore, you realize God is your source of provision and you can serve them well. You'll serve them better than if you were trying to curry favor and manipulate them. You'll serve them with integrity because your service of the Lord is the integrity that'll enhance the quality of your work.

Try bringing that offering to your governor and see how he'd think about it. If you offer it up to me in my temple, the idea is it's a higher standard. We answer to a higher standard than others do. It will become obvious that you're playing to a different audience—an audience of one rather than multiple audience of many. This is a very significant principle that we have to really watch for.

I have a whole thing about the secular-sacred duality, and there really isn't some duality. Whatever you do as unto the Lord is going to be spiritual. The so-called secular becomes spiritual when the focus of your heart is the eternal. The secular becomes spiritual when the focus of your heart is the eternal. The opposite can be true as well: the spiritual can become secular when the focus of your heart is the temporal.

Many is the preacher who's so focused on the big bucks and the lifestyle and all the accoutrements that they're focusing on the secular, not the temporal. What appears to be ministry becomes actually not ministry at all. It's manipulation. The sacred-secular dichotomy is not in the nature of your work, but in the audience to whom you play.

God has given us a promise that the product of our work will ultimately perish. You recognize that. A lot of men who rejoice over a bucket of mammon that God says he's going to burn in the end. Often a woman might be unhappy about her position in life as a bearer of an eternal being, one who's going to live forever. It's an interesting thing how that's not seen correctly.

The product of your work will perish, but what's done unto the Lord will endure. It's not the fruit of our labors, but the focus of our heart. That's what gives value to your work. Not the fruit, but the focus. Why are you doing it? For whom am I doing it? To whom am I playing? Who am I answering to? Is it to be accountable to men or is it to be accountable to God? If I'm accountable to God, then my accountability to men will be better than if it were the other way around.

Does this make sense? Secular so-called work becomes spiritual when it's done to please God. Religious work becomes secular when it's done to please and impress people. Any comments or questions? I'm just walking you through this material, but it makes sense. There are three things about stewardship. First of all, a leader is a steward, and that is their perspective.

That means that they don't own anything. They're managing the resources of another. I don't own these possessions or these talents or these arenas of influence. God does. That's my perspective. But then he's also a shepherd because he sees, as shepherds do, that they need to guide and feed and protect the sheep because they're not good at guiding themselves.

The third aspect of stewardship is your practice as a servant. You see yourself as a servant. I like alliteration, but I didn't make up those three: steward, shepherd, and servant really are biblical words. It's pleasant when it works that way. But I did the alliteration on the Ps, though. I couldn't resist it. But it helps me as a mnemonic device.

My practice is going to be expressed as a servant of other people. So-called secular becomes spiritual when it's done to please the Lord. The so-called spiritual or religious becomes secular when it's done to please and impress people. That's a very important principle for us to see.

We've talked about work and who God is and who I am, then how I think. I have this thing of men and women. Women are mysteries to me. I'm married to a mystery. She has all kinds of things I don't know about. We men are very simple. It's a simplistic notion, but it's cute. When you're married to a mystery—a man goes to a Gap for a pair of pants, a female goes to Macy's, goes to J.C. Penney, but never does go to the Gap. It's goofy.

The chances of a man winning an argument while they're dating is about 50 percent, then engagement goes lower. Then here's lecture theater A: "How to put the toilet seat down. How difficult is this really?" Lecture theater 1B: "Today we get to look before you sit." Astoundingly simple. I'm a good boy. I always put it down because I try to take care of the needs of another person.

Work and how I think—the fall affected the character of work in such a way that it became associated more with toil than with joy. You remember the seven dwarfs in *Snow White*, and what was their song? "Whistle While You Work." Why are they so happy? Well, to be honest with you, if this mine was this way and every time I went there, there were new gems—they're already cut and faceted—I'd be whistling too.

It's not so simple. That's not the nature of things. The reality is you have to work hard, and even then, you have to be faceting them and all that other stuff. We realize we live in a recalcitrant world. It's a fallen world, and the fall has definitely shaped and changed the nature. It affected the character of work in such a way it really became more associated with toil for many than with joy. By the sweat of your brow, you're now going to work.

I'm waiting for a butterfly body in a butterfly cosmos. Right now, both are caterpillars. But I'm waiting for that because imagine then the curse will be removed, and then the resurrected nature will cooperate with your desires. It'll be even better than that in the age to come. We will be still gardeners—gardeners of mystery. Everything we touch is mysterious. We don't even understand a bit of what we're looking at.

I marvel at these things. We're surrounded by mystery, are we not? We have to recognize that we are going to be gardening that, but it's going to cooperate with you. It's going to be not recalcitrant. I don't even think I'm going to drop stuff. Think about that. It's almost a frustrating thing when you try to do a thing and it doesn't work. It's like a reminder we're living in a fallen world.

I think that in our resurrection, after having gone through the judgment seat of Christ, you won't be able to think sin, and whatever you desire will be pleasing to him. Your capacity in an unfallen world where space and time cooperate with you and serve you rather than going against you is such that you'll be able to think of a thing and order it and make it so. It's going to be very rich and very profound, better than you can imagine. The most fun thing you've ever done is only a hint of something far better than that.

The whole nature of work has been sullied because of the fall. Work becomes idolatrous as well when it becomes an end in itself. We see this from Ecclesiastes and other texts. Just doing it as an end in itself, you become defined by that in that way. You must define your work or your work will define you. You must shape your work or your work will shape you.

You have to bring your identity to the work, or otherwise, you'll be consigned to deriving it from it, and then you'll become a manipulator and you'll become a person who's insecure and a person who never really will be satisfied. How profound these principles are. I think that they need to be unpacked because they're often overlooked.

Work can become a means, obviously, of exploitation and oppression. We see that from Exodus 1. Exploitation has been a motif since the beginning. It's a distortion and using work as a vehicle of power and manipulation over other people. Work hard, yes, but don't overwork. There's always a balance here. For example, the sluggard, the tragic-comic figure in the Hebrew wisdom literature.

A little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to rest, then your poverty comes upon you. Notice how he rationalizes it: "A little, a little, a little." We deceive ourselves by the smallness of our surrender. It's not a big compromise; it's just a little bit, and thus we justify ourselves because of the smallness of our compromises.

When work becomes the source of our significance and security, then what'll happen is we'll swing to the opposite extreme from the sluggard and we'll become so consumed by our work that it becomes the thing that defines us and orders us and takes precedence over relationships. So often that is the case. A person feels they're playing second fiddle to a career. It's easy to either become passive and lazy on the one hand or overdo it and define ourselves. Either way, it's a lack of the biblical balance.

We're called to do our work as unto the Lord, instead of seeking to impress and please people. Don't do it to draw attention to yourself. If there's excellence in it, may it be doxological, may it honor him. Do it as unto him. If you do it that way, then it has integrity to it. Why are you doing it? To honor the King. You're doing it as a servant of Christ.

When God is glorified in your life, you are satisfied, and the world is evangelized and edified. You'll never be satisfied unless you make God the source of your greatest joy, not yourself. When God is first and foremost, then satisfaction is a byproduct of the pursuit of God over everything else. You never get satisfaction by trying to get it. You get it by the giving up of your own devices and desires and submitting to the one for whom you were made.

Our hearts are restless until they find their rest in you. Therefore, when I seek him as my source of joy, then I will be satisfied as a byproduct. Love, joy, and peace are the byproduct of pursuing him. You can never get happiness without him; he was the source of that. But if you pursue that as an end in itself, you won't get it, but if you pursue him, the other is the byproduct.

Employers therefore should see themselves as accountable to Christ for the way they treat their employees. You will be giving an account, so serve them well. Your service to them is your service to the Lord. All these things matter. These are ways of thinking through and processing it from a biblical vantage point.

It is God then who gives us our ability. The scriptures say everything is gift and grace. He's the one who gives you your ability and he's the one who gives you your capacity, your intelligence. It's a gift from God what he's given you. He's even God who's your source of your wealth. Sometimes people say, "He's given me these things, but I made my wealth." No, you didn't.

God gave you the ability to make wealth. He gives you the lifeblood and the vitality to do that. You can't do it apart from him. Promotions come from him as well. You can serve people and look to God. We live in an unjust and unrighteous world, and often things are not proper. Sometimes people will get inordinately promoted and others will be inordinately demoted or ignored. But you look to God ultimately.

All things being equal, yes, it's true that the more you follow biblical principles of wisdom, the better off you're going to be. It's a handbook to living. But there's no guarantee in a fallen world it's going to work this way because there are all kinds of malevolent forces—spiritual forces of wickedness, malevolent people, circumstances that are always going to pull us down.

Well, I'm going to finish this up next week because we're out of time. Domination or nurture—you're nurturing. You have to decide: Am I going to cultivate and till? This is not mine; it's his, and I'm going to nurture that garden. At the end of the day, the mandate was dominion, but a responsible dominion of stewardship and fruitfulness. That's a biblical model of ecology: you've been given authority, but stewardship accountability, and make it be fruitful.

Lord, we thank you for your grace in our lives that you have given us more than we could have ever imagined. The more we unpack the riches of divine grace, the more we realize that all things come from you and through you and for you. We pray in your name. Amen.