Working for God: What If God Were Your Boss?

By Colin Noble

You long for a life that is purposeful without being pressured, satisfying without being self-centred, and God-focussed without being goalless. Youve been inspired by calls to follow Jesus with radical commitment, to desire God, not to waste your life, to live with integrity. You want to live fully devoted to God but have difficulty knowing how to do that, especially given the stress of daily life.

What if you thought about serving God like working for a boss? What if you started to work for him, seriously? What if you were to:

adopt his strategic plan wholeheartedly?

follow his instructions before all others?

accept his invitation to enter the family business?

trust that he had chosen the right coworkers for you?

work with a focus on who you work for, not what you do?

take up his mandate to rest?

In Working for God, Colin Noble combines stories of life in Japan and Australia with biblical insight, to help you see more clearly what it means to work for the best boss of all and to enjoy doing so for the rest of your life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: WestBow Press
• Release date: Oct 27, 2014
• ISBN: 9781490854632

Colin Noble

Colin Noble has spent the last three decades living on four continents and working in government, corporate, academic and pastoral settings. He is a graduate of Regent College, Vancouver, and Morling College, Sydney. He lives with his wife and two children near bushland in Sydney, Australia, where he is currently chaplain to a community of 1700 people.

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Copyright © 2014 Colin R Noble.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Scripture taken from the Holy Bible, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by Biblica, Inc. All rights reserved worldwide. Used by permission. NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION® and NIV® are registered trademarks of Biblica, Inc. Use of either trademark for the offering of goods or services requires the prior written consent of Biblica US, Inc.

Scripture quotations in this publication are from The Message. Copyright © by Eugene H. Peterson 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, 2000, 2001, 2002. Used by permission of NavPress Publishing Group.

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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

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ISBN: 978-1-4908-5462-5 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4908-5461-8 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4908-5463-2 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2014917507

WestBow Press rev. date: 10/27/2014

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction: What If—

Chapter 1: Working with Integrity

A Question of Integrity

Being Employed

Patients, Friends, Worshippers, Utensils

The Call to Work

Chapter 2: Starting to Work for the New Boss … Seriously

Real Change

Getting Serious

Full-Time Work

The Ideal Boss

Chapter 3: Dealing with the Old Boss

Misplaced Loyalty

Underestimating the Problem

Preparing for the inevitable

Being Content

Chapter 4: Not Working for the Boss

Not What the Boss Can Do for You—

What the Boss Has Done for You

Knowing the Boss

Working for the Boss

Chapter 5: Listening to the Boss

To Listen or Not to Listen

Really Listening

Not Really Listening

Chewing It Over

Chapter 6: Being Friends with the Boss

The Boss

The Boss Makes Friends

The Boss Is Always the Boss

Working as a Friend

Chapter 7: Working with Colleagues

The Right People for the Job

Getting It Wrong

Getting It Right

Freedom and Constraints

Chapter 8: Sustainable Work and Job Satisfaction

Death, Disposables, and Divorce

Fulfilling Work

Going the Distance

Working at Contentment

Chapter 9: Rest and recreation

Time Off

Who Needs Rest?

A Marvellous Gift for Us

Making Life Rest

Chapter 10: The Career Path

Aliens in a Foreign Land

Looking Ahead

Planning Ahead

Working and Resting Forever

For my former boss, Kazuo Kanamori, and his colleagues in the VIP movement

and

for Tim, hard worker,

with encouragement to work as diligently for God as you do for your earthly boss

We have not stopped praying for you and asking God to fill you with the knowledge of his will through all spiritual wisdom and understanding. And we pray this in order that you may live a life worthy of the Lord and may please him in every way: bearing fruit in every good work, growing in the knowledge of God, being strengthened with all power according to his glorious might so that you may have great endurance and patience.

—Colossians 1:9–11

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thanks

When someone asks how long it took to write your book, the answer is very hard to quantify. But if I were to try to put a figure on the hours spent on Working for God, the calculation would have to include many hours contributed by other people.

I am able to write a book that wrestles with the reality of a living God only because of numerous people who have as teachers invested in my life. Gordon Fee at Regent College years ago taught me that there is always more to learn about the Bible. In recent years, Brian Powell, my mentor for over a decade, encouraged me to pursue further graduate theological studies at Morling College, taught me in the classroom, and has guided my thinking on much more than just this book. David Starling, having stimulated my thinking as an uncompromising teacher in New Testament classes in earlier years, ran a critical theologian’s eye over the whole manuscript, challenged me to reconsider and tighten up my thinking and expression, and then took time to work with me so that it happened. Stuart Coulton, in addition to reading the manuscript at two stages, offered sage advice about dealing with publishers and expressed hugely encouraging belief in the value of the project. Trevor Cairney’s willingness with very little notice to read the manuscript and write an endorsement also encouraged me to finish the task.

Thanks are also due to Matt Sibley, former student at my school, who has chosen to continue a relationship long after obligation ceased to demand it, and who alerted me among other things to the way much younger readers would interpret my middle-aged prose.

At the other end of the age spectrum, both my parents read the full manuscript and held me to standards of grammar and expression that were instilled in me growing up and that I am in danger of losing in the maelstrom of electronic language that is our present era. Jean Nordlund took time to read and then reflect with me in the sun on a Vancouver January afternoon, but I suspect the finished product still does not convey the quiet sense of joy she exudes about basking in God’s love in the latter stages of life. My time with Jean reminded me of another conversation with Ann Hewetson in Sydney about a year earlier, in which I was encouraged to be more gentle in my wording, and of a slow lunch with Pat Gould, whose smile was more encouraging than any words.

My breakfast buddies, Sim and David, are cause for a thankful heart not just for their incisive feedback on my writing, but also for their ongoing input into my life and thinking.

The staff at Westbow Press deserve thanks for their patience in helping a novice author fulfill all publication requirements.

My most caring critic has been my wife, Wendy, who let me read aloud to her the whole manuscript. Without her continued faithfulness to the commitment we made a quarter of a century ago to spur each other on to love and good deeds, the book would not yet be finished.

The common thread in the input from all these people has been gentleness of spirit that comes from walking yoked side by side with the one who invites all who are weary to come to him and keep in step with him. If that gentleness is not reflected in this book, it is due to a shortcoming of mine, not those who advised me along the way.

So thanks go to these people. Whatever the faults of the book you are about to read, they are fewer than they would have been without the gift of time these people gave me, and ultimately you.

INTRODUCTION: WHAT IF—

Chances are that you’ve been employed. If not, you’ll know someone who has been. Or maybe you employ people. Or at the very least you’ll have seen TV shows where someone has been paid to work. Whatever our experience, all of us know something about work.

Maybe you know just enough about work to make you want to spend your life avoiding it as much as possible because you know exactly what it would involve. We all know what it means to work for a boss, whether that’s an elderly neighbor who pays you to mow the lawn when you’re a high school student, the law firm that pays you on the basis that you invoice your client in six-minute blocks at one tenth of your hourly billing rate, or something in between. Employers expect you to work for them. And we understand full well what that means.

That suggests it could be helpful to take a thing as familiar as working and use it to get a better handle on the rather more difficult idea of serving God. What if we thought about serving God and made it simple, like working for a company or a boss? What if we took the same uncomplicated attitude that good employees take into their workplaces into our relationship with God as his servants? What might that do to invigorate our lives, to help us move beyond just a mediocre pretense of working for God? How might it give us clarity of vision about serving the one who has paid for us with the life of the heir to his kingdom? How might it help us to think about priorities in life?

This book isn’t about work—that is, the sort of thing we do in return for someone putting money in our bank account. It’s about working … for God, living for God, serving God, doing God’s business, pursuing God’s objectives, implementing God’s agenda, aligning actions with God’s strategic plan. God’s. Not mine. Because I am not only employed by God but owned by God.

I didn’t use to work for God, but I was bought at a great price. A ransom has been paid for my life—a transfer fee far beyond anything ever paid by any football club to get its preferred recruit from another club. The one who paid the ransom to allow me to join him legitimately expects things of me because I now belong to him.

You might already have responded to the fact that the same ransom was paid for you. Whether you have done so or are yet to do so, my prayer is that this book will help you to see more clearly what it means to work for the best boss of all and to enjoy doing so for the rest of your life.

CHAPTER 1

WORKING WITH INTEGRITY

We are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.

—Ephesians 2:10¹

I urge you to live a life worthy of the calling you have received.

—Ephesians 4:1

A Question of Integrity

At the height of the Japanese economic boom in the second half of the 1980s, I spent several years working in the Tokyo head office of one of the largest Japanese financial institutions. Such were the power of the Japanese economy and the strength of the yen in relation to other currencies, the bank was not only one of the top five banks in Japan but also one of the top banks in the world at the time. Very soon after I left the bank, it merged and disappeared. Despite suggestions, no case has been proven of a causal link between my departure and the bank’s subsequent demise.

On one occasion during my time in Tokyo I was involved in negotiating an agreement with a major American bank to issue a new kind of joint-branded traveler’s check. The job of negotiator fell to me because I was a native speaker of English who could communicate comfortably with Americans, not because I had an intricate knowledge of the traveler’s check business or likely movements in interest or foreign exchange rates.

The idea to renegotiate the existing arrangement with the American bank was the brainchild of one of our very capable middle managers who had recently returned to Tokyo from a tour of duty in the New York branch. In the interim until his next assignment was given to him he sat with no particularly clear responsibility on the periphery of the international planning division to which I belonged. Rather than merely idle the time away, he sought a way to make a meaningful contribution. In New York he had seen the way traveler’s checks issued by the American bank with which we had a relationship flowed through our overseas branch, and he had put his mind to the consideration of how the arrangement could be altered to better benefit his employer.

In my midtwenties at the time, from this situation I learned two lessons about working with integrity that have stuck in my mind until this day. The first was manifested in the attitude of the recent returnee from New York. He did not consider the lack of specified duties a reason to slack off and merely take the opportunity to reconnect with former working colleagues and enjoy the perks of residence in the head office city (although he did some of both). He could very well have sat at his desk and done nothing for the bank on the grounds that he hadn’t been given any specific tasks. After an extended time away from the comforts of the home country, during which he had performed admirably, he must have been tempted to put up his metaphorical feet. But his commitment to the bank was such that when he saw an opportunity to further the cause of his employer, he did not need anyone specifically to tell him to do it. He just got on and acted.

The second vivid memory I still have twenty-five years after the event involves one particularly difficult negotiating session. I was acting as interpreter for a phone conversation and felt decidedly like the meat in the sandwich. My Japanese boss and I had agreed on the approach to take at this particular stage as we closed in on an agreement. I was speaking with our American counterpart while my boss, whose English was minimal, was in my ear, wanting some semblance of simultaneous interpretation of anything important. That took the form of my scribbling notes in Japanese for his approval or rejection. Conducting a conversation in one language while writing in another is a next-to-impossible task, which is why professional interpreters, whether simultaneous or consecutive, work in pairs much as sports commentators tend to, thus ensuring there is a relatively seamless flow of conversation both ways.

So my job was doubly difficult. In addition to conducting negotiations, I was attempting solo two-way interpreting—interpreting into Japanese for my boss and into English for the voice on the other end of the telephone. (We had not at this stage met face-to-face, and the idea of video conferencing was not yet a regular feature of long-distance business discussions.) The difficulty of my task was exacerbated by the fact that my counterpart sometimes had to confirm his understanding of my Australian English, to which he had no previous exposure. So complex did the task seem that had it been a ten-meter diving competition, very low scores for execution would still have resulted in medal-winning results because of the degree of difficulty of the dive.

In the long run the two institutions did manage to sign a deal, but at a crucial point in the proceedings I learned what it must feel like for a diver attempting a somersault who cracks his head on the diving platform. I had stated my bank’s final position, the figure beyond which my boss had informed me we could not possibly consider going. My counterpart’s response was simple but stunningly effective. It shattered any thought of smoothly progressing toward achievement of my objective. His response was simply this: As a representative of my bank, I cannot with integrity agree to that position.

I still remember the exact wording he used. There was no emotion, no animosity, no ridicule, no personal rejection, merely a declaration of unequivocal allegiance. It was an indication that he was not at liberty to cede ground no matter what pressure we exerted, what personal advantage we offered, what cunning spin we put on the situation, what carrot we held out, or what stick with which we sought to prod. There was no need for me to stay on the phone other than to indicate that I understood his statement and that we would have to come back to him the next day.

Ever since then, I have had a strong distaste for being the guy in the middle of two people who ought really to sit down and talk face-to-face. In general I refuse to play that role unless there is a genuine reason why direct communication is not possible, such as the lack of a common language. But the purpose of the story is more than just to explain one of my pet peeves. It is to point out that the statement of this American bank employee represents precisely the attitude we ought to have as people who have been saved to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do (Ephesians 2:10).

We work for God. Ultimately it is not up to us how we live. It is God’s call. If he says we are not to do something, but another person encourages us to do it, our reply must be the stunningly effective, I work for God. I am in Christ’s service. As a representative of Christ, I cannot with integrity agree to that. We were bought at a price (1 Corinthians 6:20; 7:23)—the life of the one who now owns us. Thus, the great British Baptist preacher Charles Spurgeon put it as follows: When tempted to sin, reply, ‘I cannot do this great wickedness, for I am Christ’s.’²

The recently returned middle manager and my American negotiating counterpart taught me lessons in organizational loyalty and integrity. Several other colleagues I worked alongside had quite contrasting perspectives on working with integrity. Takamori³, for example, was fourteen years older than I was. One day he told me that the attitude he had to work was that he was simply borrowing a seat from his employer so that he could do what he wanted to do in the world. In order to sustain that advantage—one of a position he could use as a launching pad for his own purposes—Takamori was committed to doing enough for the bank that there would be no cause to dismiss him. His contribution could be the bare minimum necessary, he argued, because his labor was the rent he