Check it at the Door

You pull your car into the stall and take the elevator to your floor. This early in the morning people barely talk to each other and that’s probably a good thing, since you don’t want to talk to anybody at all: this morning you had to scrape the snow off the car and on the way to work someone cut you off. And you burned your hand on your coffee. One coworker â€" the one who’s always here early â€" gives you a smile and a wave. You grunt and head to your desk. It’s another day at your job.

Confession time: That was me, years ago. I punched the clock at work and did my job, avoided some of the more annoying coworkers, and went home as soon as I could each day.

Do you feel that way, too? Too often, we view our job apart from the rest of our lives. It’s as if we have our work-selves and our non-work-selves. The non-work-self is the person we think of if we were ever asked to describe ourselves. Our work-self is someone quite different.

But Christ came to redeem our whole person: body, soul, mind, and both the work-self and the non-work-self. Is Christ’s redemption apparent in your work-self? For me, it was not.

I don’t mean to suggest that I was a “Sunday Christian� who lived an unredeemed life through the week at work. What I mean is that the joy of the Lord was my strength… in my personal life but I didn’t put it in my briefcase when I drove to work every morning.

In fact, that was almost a bigger problem. Here’s why: If I simply hid my faith and didn’t tell anyone I was a believer, I would have blended in to the crowd and the role of evangelist would fall to another believer. No one would be the wiser about my hidden faith. But instead, I felt (rightly so) that as a believer I should share my faith and lead a life that was an example to others. So I lived morally and righteously… but I didn’t always show that Christ brings joy and peace to believers.

So what good was I? In retrospect, none at all. As believers we need to go to work with the lifestyle evangelism attitude: live a life that is moral and upright, just as Christ would. But that’s half of the life-style evangelism picture. The other half (or the bigger half?) is living a life that is joyous.

And that’s what will make a real impact in your workplace evangelism. How can believers win unbelievers to Christ if they are only living a life that appears moral and righteous but are just as grumpy and callous as everyone else? That’s why so many unbelievers feel that Scripture is just a life of do’s and don’t’s rather than the life-changing Word of God!

So if you decide to be more than a “Sunday Christian� at work, you need to live a life that demonstrates how Christ would live… and that includes being just a bit different than the other people that are in the elevator each morning.

You don’t have to be so joyous that you are annoyingly insensitive. But you can start by smiling at that early riser who says hello to you in the morning. You can step onto the elevator whistling a tune. You can try to find the good things about the day to show people that the joy of the Lord is YOUR strength.

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