Luke 19:1-10

 The hands of Mr. Irving Lattimer, Gene Kilgore, and Jacques Marie put in hundreds of hours for the church. Lattimer was a man of the 1950’s and rigged up lights and switches all over the building. He put a lighted wooden star on the tower every Christmas. He dug a private well in the church basement when the city was short of water. Even this morning, there are some touches in this room that were added 50 years ago by Lattimer. Gene Kilgore tended the garden. When Gene was here, he was over many times each week to plant and tend things in the garden. Jacques Marie changed the lights in this room in an unusual way. He took a short ladder up the back balcony to the beam. Then he threw the ladder forward to the next beam and crawled across the bridge. He straddled the beam and drew the ladder along to throw again as he moved between beams. How did you think they changed these lights anyway? And we’ve got one out so we’re looking for a volunteer!

They did all this work and then life slipped on and their names were remembered by fewer and fewer. Was it worth it? That’s the question. Our hands are the major way that most of us labor. Even an office worker uses hands to type, pick up paper, and use the phone. Are your hands doing work that’s worth it? Or are you wondering how to use your hands so that 50 years from now, someone will think you made a difference.
 "You know, I like what I do, but I guess at the end of my life I’m wondering if it will really have mattered that I sold TVs." Or someone says, "I enter data at a computer terminal 40 hours a week. Sometimes when I drive home on Friday afternoons, I wonder if this is a worthy-enough endeavor for me to be pouring my one and only life into." There is a restlessness in every heart unless our hands are at a task with meaning for our one and only life.
 We’re going to hear another lifesaving story of God this morning. God offers every person a sacred way to use their labor. Its one of most basic human needs and God provides for you and me. If you are wondering if your life is doing enough, listen to God’s good word this day and ask for a new anointing of your hands.
 

Two thousand years ago, Jesus said some very penetrating words to a group of commercial fishermen. He said, "Up to this point in your lives, you have simply been fishermen. Nothing wrong with that. But from here on, I want you to think of yourselves as fishers of men and women." Another time Jesus said, "Most people think the highest treasure in this life is money, but I tell you, the greatest treasure in this life is people ." It’s people -- loving people, developing people,  pointing people toward God.
 Do you think Jesus was saying that all of his true followers would have to abandon the workplace and become church workers and missionaries? Or was Jesus saying there’s really two classes of work out there? There are people who do secular work, which is bad, and then there are those who do religious work and that’s good? Is that what Jesus was saying? Absolutely not.
 What Jesus was saying is that workers in any profession will wither up on the inside until they discover the one treasure of people that breathes meaning and purpose to every single job in the workplace. That’s looking around the job site and saying, "I’m surrounded by the truest treasure in the eyes of God -- people -- and I have the opportunity to love them, serve them, lift them and point them toward faith in God."
  Most of us have had it drummed into us all of lives that the real treasure is profit. It’s making money. It’s power. It’s achievement.. One problem of cash jobs in New York is that employers often don’t worry about the needs and comfort of a cash worker or reasonable breaks or safety. It’s money first, profit first, and people last.
 The Bible doesn’t see profits as the true treasure, the ultimate treasure, the highest purpose of the marketplace endeavor.
The Bible sees profit as making people treasure, self confident workers who are able to support their loved ones, to grow in their skills and talents, to maximize their god-given potential and to be able to make a difference in this world.
  I want to describe four kinds of companies to you, based against the biblical paradigm of putting people first and treating them as the true treasure and what a difference that can make in your whole orientation about going to work from 9 to 5 Monday through Friday. And you can help your workplace to gain another star and make sacred the work of your hands.
 A one-star company is a rotten place to work. They work employees as hard as possible, pay as low a wage as possible with as few benefits as possible. Some of the workers in this company might be Christ followers, and they’re going to have to pray like crazy to keep their attitudes right to do their best to honor God and work with a good spirit.
Zaccheus was running a 1 star company . He had been award the tax collection contract for the Romans. His job was to get at least enough from the District to pay the Romans what they demanded. Then anything over that he could keep as profit. He got a band of enforcers and became the scourge of the district. And of course, he only paid his own collectors what they could force from him. It was a one star situation.
 Workers in one-star companies better have flourishing family lives, better be a part of flourishing church, because from Monday to Friday, they’re going to get their soul beat up pretty badly on the job site. It is hard to be a Christian and work at a 1 star company. But its needed. When you help a 1 star company get better, you are affecting the life of the worker next to you who is trying to stop smoking, the customer who’s mother died yesterday and the kid who dropped out of high school to work there.
 A two-star is considerably more people-friendly. In fact, the owners of two-star companies often pride themselves in being able to offer employment opportunities to a lot of people, as many people as possible, and this is a very admirable thing. Workers in two-star companies are usually treated fairly and respectfully. The culture in two-star companies is usually open and friendly and morale’s quite high. There’s trust between management and labor, and all-in-all, two-star companies are pretty pleasant environments to work in.
 But now let’s look at a three-star company. Three-star companies really do put people first. The managers of these companies derive enormous satisfaction from not just hiring as many people as they can, but they derive enormous satisfaction for lifting every worker in the company to his or her highest level. 3 star companies make significant reinvestment back into the workers that generated the income in the first place. They offer educational opportunities for workers. They take leadership development and job training seriously.
The owner of a 3 star company said, "When you’ve been around as long as I have, done as many deals as I’ve done, made and lost as much money as I’ve made and lost, it’s the people you tend to remember. It’s the people whose lives you touched and changed. That’s the real payoff in the final analysis."
  The four-star company is like finding a diamond. A four-star company is almost always owned or run by a mature, dedicated Christ follower. This individual has thought long and hard, not just about putting people over profit, but about how to leverage all of the resources of the company in ways that honor God and serve people and advance the kingdom of God in this world. The Christian company goes a step further and wrestles every day with the question, what can we do to help our workers and their families find God? What can we do on a daily basis to help our people grow, not just vocationally, but spiritually?
 They make high quality Christian books and tapes and music CDs and other resources available free of charge for every worker in the company. Occasionally they’ll offer seminars at lunch hour or after work on such topics as how you can build a marriage, how you can do better parenting, and all of this is from a Christian perspective. A worker was asked how long he hoped to stay at the company, and he said, "Barring a call from God, I’ll be there the rest of my life. Where would I rather work?"
 Wouldn’t it be something if starting today, that we would start asking God to show us how we could make our particular company go up one star? If you’re in the 1 star company start to pray for one person. Be nice when others aren’t. Workers are usually mean in 1 star companies. I used a Holiday Inn in Buffalo for a conference. It was the meanest place. I ordered coffee and he tried to charge for the cup. We just tried to stay out of the hallways and get the meetings over. About a month later, I read where the workers sued the hotel for discrimination. The workers gave us what the hotel gave them. That is the common reaction.

But friends, wherever you are, as a Christian, you have a chance to turn that labor into work for God. You don’t have to be as mean as your employer. You can take the company higher. You’re not getting the second star for the owner, you’re getting it for other workers, for the city, for the kingdom of God. Set your hands to sacred tasks tomorrow. Help build an operation that will honor God and seek in creative ways to point people to faith in God.
 Wouldn’t it be something if every manager and worker developed a personal vision for going into the workplace with a sense of purpose to put people first and to lift them and love them and serve them, help them achieve their vocational and spiritual potential.
 I doubt if there’s any place right now that you could have a greater impact for good and for God than where you go to work each day. All that’s necessary for you to awaken the possibilities of that team all around you is a vision for what God could do through you.
 And what would that do to your sense of purpose, your sense of meaning when you go to work each day? It will change it radically. What would it be like to go to your retirement party and look back over the course of your career and say, "You know, I not only helped offer people some jobs, I not only helped lift people to their highest vocational potential, but there are people in the kingdom of God, there are people who are going to go to heaven because of my company, because of our department, because of this, because of that." How cool is that? It’s within your reach. It’s within mine. It just takes an anointing of your hands.