Meeting Jesus at Work

This morning as I was thinking about the call of Matthew (Levi) in Mark 2, the thought came to me, "He was at work." This hardly seems like a profound or life-changing insight, and it isn't as if I didn't know this already, but for some reason it became inescapably obvious. When Jesus called Matthew to be a disciple, Matthew was at work. He was at his office. He was sitting at his desk.

As I continued to think about this, I realized that several of Jesus' disciples were at work when the call of discipleship came. Peter and Andrew and James and John were working on their fishing boats (Mark 1:16-20). So at least five of the twelve named disciples encountered Jesus in a profoundly life-changing way while at work. We don't know the specifics of the calling to the others, with the exception of Nathaniel who came to Jesus at the invitation of Philip (John 1:43-51), but Philip encounters Jesus in the middle of the week.


The more I thought about this, the more I realized that at least half of these disciples came to Jesus, not in a synagogue service or at a Temple-sponsored event, but in the midst of their daily lives. There is a dose of conviction in this thought, for how often do we limit our expectations of God's activities to church moments? But church constitutes such a small percentage of our daily living. There are 168 hours in a week. If a person is at church four hours a week, that is 2.4% of the total time of the week. Our faith should be active and at work and applied for more than 2.4% of our lives! And the testimony of Scripture is clear - faith and grace aren't reserved for "religious times." Faith and grace plant themselves in the middle of our lives - work, family, and play. It is here that we really encounter God, and it is here that our faithfulness is most evident.

May God be evident in the middle of your daily life today!