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Re Think Work: #3 “The First Calling” – Genesis 11:3-9
Dr. Matthew Cassidy – 3/17/2013
Good morning and Happy St. Patrick’s Day. In the Bible, you will see, and quite vividly in the Older
Testament, in the stories a comparison and contrast between the way God sees and values a human being
and the way Man sees and values a human being.
There is one classic expression where it just comes out in holy writ and spoken that way. Oddly
enough, a priest, Samuel, who has been raised in a monastery, mind you, is going to anoint the next King
of Israel. When he meets the first born, biggest, best looking son of Jesse, he says to himself: Surely this
is the one the Lord wants me to anoint. The Lord reprimands him because even being cloistered or the
sequestered experience of growing up, he still had this mindset. God says to him: Man judges on outward
appearance and God judges on the heart of the man, on the inward appearance. It is very common for us
to think that way. The reason that God judges the heart of a man is because that is what motivates what he
does and that makes all the difference in a whole life.
But it is not just God that does that. Some people with wisdom and insight know how to pick a
real hero. I will give as a simple example, a clip of this video:
Clip of Video: Captain America
https-//www.dropbox.com/#24ACC6
Military Cadets: Survival depends on death of ego.
In the United States Military Academies, the students there are some of the brightest, the best we
have. 84% of the students who apply for any one of the academies is rejected out of hand and never get to
the campus. Of the 16% who do arrive there, they have a problem and they don’t even know they have a
problem.
Each of the cadets upon arrival has already made a name for themselves or they would not have
made it through the first filter. So they have made a name for themselves maybe academically because
they are extremely intelligent, or maybe they are athletic, or they have leadership ability – or maybe all of
the above. People knew them back home.
That is the problem. They have a name for themselves but in the military, you don’t have a name.
So when you raise your right hand – and by the time you are finished with that oath – the trainers are out
to take your name away. You will be known for your unit and maybe your rank but from that point on, the
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summer before you take a class, they put you through boot camp to prepare you. It is really a bit of a
game, a conspiracy to make you well and to take away the things that will ruin you later.
So they intentionally pack thirty hours worth of expectations into a 24-hour day. They are
constantly grading and scoring you on absolutely every aspect of your life. It is not just the athletic parts
but also it is the appearance of individual score keeping on posture, marching to classes and meals, and
even how you tie your shoes. You are hovered over. Again, trainers are keeping score and making sure
who is doing what and doing it right. Day and night they are looking at the cadets.
The goal in all of this is two-fold. One is to eliminate any semblance of perfectionism because you
can’t be perfect when trainers are pushing everything to 110%. They are doing that on purpose so that
they can see how you react when you can’t live with that. The trainers are weeding out or the cadets are
“self-initiated out” because they can’t live with this new goal in mind. They are breaking these guys on
purpose.
What is entertaining, if you are not there, is to see that while they are keeping score individually,
that is not really how they are scoring them. They are scoring them on whether or not they can think like a
unit, whether they care more about the members of their squadron rather than themselves because in
combat when the going gets tough, you have to make decisions unselfishly – it’s not about your safety but
the squadron or unit’s safety.
It sounds like pointless hazing but it is not. You have heard the expression: “Never follow a man
who has not been broken.” Well, they want to make sure that is true in their case because when these
cadets graduate, they will be 21 or 22 years old and other people’s lives will be dependent upon their
decision making skills. Most of them have never failed. They have always been able to rise to whatever
level was expected of them. So the trainers are pushing the cadets to 110%, 30 hours in a 24-hour day
because the leaders have to see what happens when the cadets fail. There is a great quote in the military:
“No plan survives first contact with the enemy.” [von Moltke]
So failure is a certainty. But these young cadets have never failed so the leaders want to see what
happens. First, do they throw tantrums? Do they blame other people? These cadets, once they lower their
right hand, they are told: You can say three things: Yes sir. No sir. And no excuse sir. So when they are
failing, those are the three options. Do they just want to explain the whole thing away? Are they going to
sit and sulk and talk about if things had been different? Because while they are sitting and sulking, or
while they are paralyzed in fear or self pity, men and women are dying. Leaders do this so that people
who have names for themselves, their names are taken away. The smart guy, his GPA is falling and he
has never had that happen before. The athlete, the only way she can maintain that athletic standard is to
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compromise in other areas. The hard worker – really, you got here by hard work – you can’t work hard
enough here. The name they made for themselves, their identity has to leave because they cannot survive.
Even better, other people will literally not survive if these cadets have maintained a perfectionistic
attitude.
So, it is almost the mirror image of Nietzsche’s famous phrase: If it doesn’t kill you, it makes you
stronger. What makes you stronger will kill you. The thing that made you so important, that got you
through the 86% filter, that got you onto that campus, the thing that makes you so strong, if you don’t let
that go, you will hold on to it to the bottom of the ocean where you will drown.
When work becomes our primary calling in life.
Life is like that, isn’t it? Do you ever think there is a conspiracy or officer overlooking your life,
and you are saying: Wait a minute. I am being pushed to 110%. I could manage when I was single and
when I was newly married. When I was newly married, I could do those things. But when the first child
came, boy, did we have some changes. But that is okay because I am still the first one at the office and the
last one to leave.
Then life keeps happening and you made a name for yourself in some area and that name is being
taken away. God himself is the one doing that. That just happens in life, not once or twice, but that is how
we get to the walls of where we plateau where we sit for a long time.
If you made a name for yourself as a great parent and you were puffed up with pride about that,
children can turn on you. Or, they will just leave. Or, they become teenagers. There are a lot of options
there.
Here is what happens by the way. The reason we are talking about this is that it is in the context of
our four-week sermon series on Work. Work can become pointless and fruitless when it becomes our
identity. Here is the thesis of today. Work can become pointless and fruitless; it can become the drudgery
we know it to be when it becomes our primary calling in life. We have talked about our work being our
vocation or our calling. This is so classic of men who are bent as a consequence of the Fall. We take what
God gave us as a gift and then we make it more important than what it was meant to be; it is a Means but
we make it an End. Then we ruin it and it destroys us.
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Classic Illustration: Tower of Babel account
Gen. 11:1-9
Turn to Genesis 11. This is a classic expression of this. This is a gift that God gives us – industry
and ambition – and we will see how it is used against us and God. Instead of taking work, which in the
Garden of Eden (Chapter 1 and 2) is worship and it is a way of expressing our love for God. One of the
ways we do that is by bringing chaos into order. Another way we do that is to love our neighbors through
the industry we work with.
But look at Chapter 11 of Genesis and I want you to be listening for what is motivating these men
and women in the building of this city. That is the key – what is motivating them – not what they are
doing but why they are doing it.
Genesis 11:1, 2 Now the whole world had one language and a common speech. As men
moved eastward, they found a plain in Shinar and settled there.
11:3, 4 They said to each other, “Come, let’s make bricks and bake them thoroughly.”
They used brick instead of stone, and tar for mortar. Then they said, “Come, let us build
ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for
ourselves and not be scattered over the face of the whole earth.”
11:5-7 But the LORD came down to see the city and the tower that the men were building.
The LORD said, “If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this,
then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and
confuse their language so they will not understand each other.”
11:8, 9 So the LORD scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped
building the city. That is why it was called Babel – because there the LORD confused the
language of the whole world. From there the LORD scattered them over the face of the
whole earth.
There are two reasons given for the building of the tower.
1. You had to have read ahead of time but the key word repeated three times is the word
“scattered.” In Genesis 9:1 and again later (this is right after Noah) God tells mankind to fill the earth.
The implication is to scatter and fill the earth. So the men and women head East but they say: Hey, let’s
stay right here and not spread out. So the first motivation is defiance of a direct command. We know what
is better than God and we will do what we want.
2. Kind of a deeper but more subtle answer is found in verse 4, which I find very interesting. This
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is the theme of today’s teaching time. It says: (Gen. 11:4) “so that we may make a name for ourselves;
otherwise we will be scattered over the face of the whole earth.” They want to make a name for
themselves – that is what is motivating them. It is ironic because they will try so hard to take what God
gave them – industry, the ability to work and to create and to build – and they are going to get creative
with that – (11:3) “They used brick instead of stone, and tar for mortar.” They do not use it to worship
God; they use it to worship work. They want their name chiseled in these bricks. That is why they are
doing what they are doing, to make a name for themselves.
I want you to see, if nothing else today, that the Bible is so relevant because people have not
changed. We are till making bricks instead of using stones, somehow, with industry. But why? So that we
can make a name for ourselves.
Old Testament scholar Derek Kidner writes:
“The elements of the story are timelessly characteristic of the spirit of the world. The
project is typically grandiose; …
Listen to the way Kidner is talking about Babel but I want you to hear work talk and even church growth
talk in this.
… men describe it excitedly to one another as if it were the ultimate achievement … At the
same time they betray their insecurity as they crowd together to preserve their identity and
control their fortunes.”
When we excitedly gather together and talk about this exciting vision as though it is the ultimate, that is
when it becomes a name for ourselves. It is a God-given thing. It is so subtle that we take the things of
God and we put them in our pocket. It is something for us to care for but it grows into an idol. The next
thing you know, it is not serving us but we are serving it. It is telling us what to do. There is a dark side of
all these gifts from God once they become bigger than they were meant to be.
So comfort and pleasure are good things (rest on the Sabbath) but we then make that the reason we
exist. Thank God for Friday, right? So we can just rest but then the next thing you know, we become a
sloth, lazy and now we can’t be industrious.
Or, we are ambitious and industrious and God gave us that but now we use it to run our lives into
the ground. There is no turning it down.
God wants us to have limited sovereignty, control, but what do we do when we take that and make
it an idol? Then we don’t trust other people. They are not doing it right. We are micromanaging. The
things that God gives us to worship Him, we start worshipping those things and then they destroy us.
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It goes from good to great to devouring. In many ways, we can manage this as long as life is
manageable. But life is not meant to be manageable. God won’t let it be manageable so that we can have
these idols flushed out. When you go quail hunting, you send the dogs out first so that they flush the quail
so you know where they are. There is a lot of hardship in life, which does that [flushes out idols].
It is easy to see it in other people’s lives. So how do you find it in your own life? How do you
know if you have taken a good thing and turned it into a bad thing? Usually it is one of two extremes: (1)
When you are known for and someone speaks about that, you can feel your pride well up. Spread the
word and tell your friends. If that doesn’t work and you are not listening to your ego, realizing you have
to do something before God, then the second one is … (2) When this name is threatened, it might be taken
away. Then you get anxious, scared, and angry. It is like these military cadets who start to break. God’s
plan is to put us into 110% of pressure so it is evident when we break. Are we going to pout? Are we
going to throw a tantrum? Are we going to blame someone else? Are we just going to sit and sulk? Then
what are we going to do about what the bigger, deeper issue is? Why did we make a name for ourselves
with that in the very first place?
How does it happen – especially as our bodies are getting slower, stiffer, and heavier – but
expectations in life are getting higher and higher still? Then we lose something like the athlete who blows
out his knee.
Iron Man Identity
The guy who used to do announcements at the church I attended in southern California was a radio
announcer. Boy, he did announcements. He had a wonderful voice.
Then something terrible happened to him. He competed in the Iron Man Competition (the early
80s) which was then relatively new. This was the original Iron Man held in Hawaii. He came back and he
was Bill “Iron Man” Smith. He always had a piece of clothing on with the Iron Man logo on it. He painted
the Iron Man logo on his mailbox. Every time he would talk, it would lead to his Iron Man thing.
It was so funny because at events where he was going to be introduced anyway, some of us would
tease him by introducing him as a triathlete. You don’t understand. A triathlete is a person who does these
three sports but they might not do the Iron Man. The Iron Man is swimming 2.5 miles, biking 112 miles,
and then running a full marathon afterward. A triathlete could do 10% of that. So we would say: Here is
Bill and he is a triathlete. --- I went to Iron Man, the one in Hawaii, the REAL one! – Okay.
The point is that life got harder and harder for him. He had to make a choice about what was going
to identify him. He had three children; one was just breaking into junior high. You can’t train for an Iron
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Man with young children – but he could because he let them go. He left his family for a key ring with a
logo on it. He kept the house, which made more room for his equipment so he could practice even in the
rain. He could not let it go. He was the Iron Man.
Here is a weird part about it. He wasn’t even all that good. The reason they let him come back
every year was because he was the voice of the Iron Man. So he would do the pre- and post- race
announcements. It wasn’t like this was a career; it was an identity.
How to Prevent Making a Name for Ourselves
How do you keep that from happening? You drift into it – I am telling you – and that is the scary
thing. So once you are there, what do you do? Or, is there something we can do? We have been calling
work a calling, a vocation, and worship. So what are we doing wrong if we find ourselves making a name
for ourselves and building a tower of Babel?
Os Guinness wrote a book entitled “The Call” which is probably the deepest book on this issue of
vocation and calling. He writes very critically about people getting reckless with exalting our occupation
and vocation to the point where it takes the place of God. It puts God, somehow, in the back seat. He says
the way you do this – keep from doing it or how you get back home; it sounds counter intuitive but the
way you make your work matter to God is to make sure God matters more than work. --- Another way of
putting it, he said: Put first things first and second things second because when second things are first, you
lose everything.
Here is a fabulous quote:
“Beware of anything that competes with loyalty to Jesus Christ. The greatest competitor of
devotion to Jesus is service for Him … The one aim of the call of God is the satisfaction of
God, not a call to do something for Him.”
Did you hear the subtlety? If you are doing something for God, sometimes something happens where you
start serving the doing instead of the God. Maybe if you are involved in missions or ministry, it is even
easier to do that. God is not calling you to be busy. Your first call is to be enduring.
Here is another quote from Guinness and then he jumps into a quote from Oswald Chambers:
The call of God blocks the path of all such deeply human tendencies (to make false idols).
We are not primarily called to do something or go somewhere; we are called to Someone.
We are not called first to special work but to God. The key to answering the call is to be
devoted to no one and to nothing above God himself. As Chambers said, “The men and
women Our Lord sends out on His enterprises are the ordinary human stuff, plus
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dominating devotion to Himself wrought by the Holy Spirit.” The most frequent phrase in
his writings: “Be absolutely His.”
Can you hear the mild difference that separates life from death in those quotes? You are to serve Someone
– not some activity. When you take your eyes off the face of Christ, then no matter what you do for a
living, whether you think you are serving your neighbor or fighting entropy, you will feel how it is not the
same any more. You have lost your first love, like it says in the book of Revelation. When you lose your
first thing, you lose everything.
Matt’s Personal Experience
This happened to me. In 1996, it was the first of a few burnouts and breakdowns that I had, and it
was perfect. I was ripe for it at 35 or 36 years old. The bigger picture is (and I will fill in the details) that I
was doing nothing well.
I was working here at this church and I was not particularly proud of the work I was doing. I was
giving myself maybe a C+ or a B-.
I would go home to three children under five and that is a very needy age. So it meant getting
down on the carpet mostly and playing with them. You can’t talk with them so much; it is just playing
with them. I was very impatient about that. I would give myself a C- in that category.
Marriage – I would fight for a C.
I had given up everything that was mine because of the age of the children. So it wasn’t like I had
any more hobbies or athletic engagements or anything like that. There was just nothing for me.
Even what I was doing, I was going to a class, filling out forms and pay extra fees or fines so that I
could turn in late papers that were terrible.
Then this was the last straw that broke the jackass’ back – my house. We were strapped for money
and I was barely making ends meet. The house was not maintained. I was looking at the yard which was
in disrepair or all but dead. Here is the best part. My neighbor and I both started on the same weekend
painting the house. He has a two-story house which is mostly wood. I have a one-story house which has
three sides of stone. All I have to do is the trim – one easy weekend. I scrapped the paint all the way down
to the wood, all the way around, put it down, and left it there – for months. So the wood is baking in the
Central Texas sun. I would come home from making C’s at work to a house where I could make B’s and
C’s in marriage and family – with the haunting paper that is due that I won’t do well on – to stare from
my driveway at the dead lawn and rotting wood.
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There was nothing that I could find that I was remotely proud of. I was the cadet. I don’t have an
emotion to attach to this.
Fortunately I went to lunch with a friend of mine who is a counselor and we were really good
friends. I was telling Rick all of this. He just said: You are so wrong. You have changed the way you view
your life. Sure, all of these things you could make a name for yourself, all of those have been lost. So you
have a blank page. You should not have been bragging about those things anyway. [He is a cognitive
therapist. That means if you change the way you think, you think the way you will behave. If you change
the way you think, you will change the way you are.] So Rick said: What do you know about yourself that
is absolutely true that could never be taken away?
I said: Oh, you are talking about Bible verses, aren’t you, Rick?
He said: Yeah, I am talking about Bible verses, Matt.
This is stolen from the pages of Ephesians. I will put the same slide up there from when we were in the
series on Ephesians. These are from the first two or three paragraphs from the first chapter of Ephesians.
This is true about you if you are a follower of Christ.
1. For He chose us before the Creation of the world to be holy and blameless.
2. In love He predestined us to be adopted as His sons.
3. In Him we have redemption through His blood,
4. And the forgiveness of sins,
5. We get to be part of this huge intergalactic plan – to bring all things in heaven and on
earth together under Christ.
6. Having believed, we were marked in Him with a seal, the promised Holy Spirit.
7. The Spirit is a deposit guaranteeing our inheritance.
That is true and it cannot be taken away. The name for yourself isn’t even yours; it is given to you.
So, Rick said: You have got to start thinking this way.
I asked: How do you do that?
He said: Well, look at it as kind of a version of brain cleaning or brain washing.
This is just notes from last semester. If the blue is what is true and it is found in God’s Word, and
the red is the junk about making a name for yourself because you are smart or athletic or successful or a
hard worker, and over time you have to replace these transitory things that are petty anyway and they
have to be replaced with Bible truths. You need to capture every thought. You need to think the right
things about what God says is true.
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I am going to go so fast through this because it is review. But if it is new to you, let’s just stop and
I will give you one simple application, I guess. How do you change your mind? How do you change the
way you think? How are you transformed by the renewing of your mind?
1. The first thing you do is read your Bible and meditate on that. You have to be transformed
by God’s grace. How do you know? Not because someone said so but because the Bible says so. So you
have to saturate your mind with Bible memory verses. You probably know television commercials and
your fight song from college; but you are supposed to be memorizing the Bible. That can transform you.
We do a thing here called “The Voyage” which is a method of reading through the Bible. You can
do this on line and there are bookmarks with the prescribed readings at the Visitor Center. We are also
using a devotional for Lent. So, if you come here regularly, we are going to try to figure out ways to
reprogram your thinking somehow.
2. The second one is people and that is to be connected. Uh oh, we are going through our
purpose statement, our vision. We are connected through relationships. Why? Because while you are
trying to read the Bible, or you are slipping on that, you have a “Rick” who is sitting across the table from
you and he says: Now you are going to have to pay for lunch because you forgot who you are in Christ.
You are going to keep paying until you memorize some verses.
The other thing Rick did was say: I am coming over on Saturday and you better have all the paint
and all the brushes because we are going to finish that house. And we did! It was a project that was
defeating me because I was so alone in doing it. Rick said: Many hands make light work. Come on. I
haven’t seen you in a while. Let’s paint your house together. And we did. He loved my soul and he told
me the truth; he loved my soul because he knew I was a man who hated staring at a house with bare
wood.
3. The third one is practice. This is service. We are committed to service and here is why I love
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this idea. The reason I put practice up there is from a chapter of C. S. Lewis’ book “Mere Christianity.” It
is a great chapter called “Let’s Pretend.” Here is why I love this. It works and it is true.
Lewis says: Let’s think about this. Aren’t we mostly pretending to be who God says we already
are? Stop and think about it. The first line of The Lord’s Prayer: Our Father who art in heaven. Really?
Your Father is God? Lewis jumps in and says: You bet He is. He told you to pray that prayer and it
doesn’t matter if you believe it or not. Start acting like it. Start acting like you are the daughter of the
King of the Universe. Start acting like your Father is the Father. Start acting like the Son. What happens is
that ethical decisions are sometimes made for you. What is a son of God doing in a place like this? But
also it has to do with practice of the disciplines. You practice them – and it is called “putting on the
character of God.” When you are serving in the nursery and you are getting to that 110% [of stress level],
you can pretend to be nice and kind and then eventually you will actually one day find yourself being nice
and kind. Practice.
4. The last thing I want to put up there is prayer because Paul teaches us how to pray. If you
want to take one application home today, I am going to combine them by saying, memorize these two
verses. This is how Paul prayed for you 2000 years ago; this is how you pray for your son or daughter;
this is how you pray for your mate; this is how you pray for you. You can memorize this. Listen to how
he is going to ask us to think differently. I will start with verse 15 and I will put on the slides for verses 17
and 18.
Ephesians 1:15-18 For this reason, ever since I heard about your faith in the Lord Jesus and
your love for all the saints, I have not stopped giving thanks for you, remembering you in
my prayers. I keep asking that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the glorious Father, may
give you the Spirit of wisdom and revelation, so that you may know Him better.
What is that? That is Os Guinness’ first calling. Your first calling is to enjoy God, so that you would
know the Spirit of wisdom (he is talking about your head and brain now).
I pray also that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened (imagination) in order that you
may know the hope to which He has called you, the riches of His glorious inheritance in
the saints, …
I want your heart to be imagining so that you would know the hope – be very careful about possessive
pronouns here – of His glorious inheritance, which is you. Earlier, we inherit the Holy Spirit. This verse
says: You are His glorious inheritance.
Do you believe that? – I don’t care if you believe that. Pretend that when God looks into His
trophy shelf, He sees you there. So God wants you to make a name for yourself by enjoying His face.
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That is what He wants you to do. You have to let go of these other things to become – you have to die so
that you can live.
Here is an interesting little thing that I bring up because our high school students studied the book
of Esther over spring break. Esther was the queen of Persia and she is called that fourteen times in the
book of Esther. What is fascinating is that she is called the Queen of Persia only one time – until she says
the line, “If I perish, I perish.” After that, after she gives up the name for herself, then thirteen more times,
it is Queen Esther, Queen Esther, Queen Esther. It is the name God gives her – after she gives up.
Still not convinced? Do you want a name for yourself? I think this is what the passage means in
Revelation 2:17 that God gives each and every one of us a name. He gives us a name and only He knows
that name.
Do you want to grab onto something that no one could ever steal from you? That you could make
a name for yourself? Grab that. Grab the future hope that when you are greeted by your Savior, He calls
you and you know it. Your soul knows it. He calls you a name that only He knows and He says: That is
the name for yourself. That is your first hope, your first calling, your reason to live. Then everything else
fits in its place.
Let’s pray and I will pray Jeremiah’s prayer for us. Jeremiah 9
You wise man, if you are going to boast, do not boast in your wisdom.
You strong man, do not boast in your strength.
You rich woman, if you are going to boast, do not boast in your wealth.
For him who boasts, boast in this: That you understand that you know Me, for I am the Lord God, who
exercises kindness and justice and righteousness on all the Earth. For in these things, I delight, says the
Lord Jesus. And all God’s people said, Amen.
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