Fearlessly Courageous
Desk of Dennis Piller
9/12/2022
Your Career is Just one-eighth of Your Life.
Your Career is Not Your Life!
The typical career is just 80,000 hours long. I know that seems a staggering number but the typical person lives a little over 4,000 weeks. We are awake and conscious for about 3,000 weeks. Ok, so do the math. That means an average career is roughly the equivalent of 480 sleepless weeks of labor. Let’s break it down further. A typical person has five waking hours for every one hour of their career.
In this article by Derek Thompson he also said,
“Work is too big a thing to not take seriously. But it is too small a thing to take TOO seriously. Your work is one-eighth of your waking existence. Your career is not your life. Behave accordingly."
What does that say to you? What are you thinking that means?
Can you be ruthlessly honest with yourself about what you value? —
and how much professional success matters to you?
And is Jesus a side note? A squeezed-in guilt factor?
Or he’s there…just somewhere down the totem pole?
I know this isn’t New Years and we aren’t taking an annual assessment of our goals and purposes but maybe we should take an audit of perspectives.
What are you allowing to define you as a person? How would you describe yourself? Can you give me a pilot paragraph that might define you? Your spouse and your children? What are you? Who are they?
That would be a worthwhile exercise, wouldn’t it? How can you really help someone without that penetrating gaze? What does your fruit tell you?
More than a word. Christian. What did that paragraph – epitaph – say about the fruit of your Christian existence? Faith, Love, life’s purpose.
Phil 2: 12 -13 “work out your own salvation because God is working in you both the willing and the working for His good pleasure”.
God causes the miracle of Love in us and then
we act out that miracle in our lives.
1 Thess 3:11-13 Now may our God and Father himself and our Lord Jesus direct our way to you. 12 And may the Lord make you increase and abound in love for one another and for all.” (both believers and non-believers)
In 1 Peter 2:11–12. Peter wrote,
Beloved [writing to Christians], I urge you as sojourners and exiles to abstain from the passions of the flesh, which wage war against your soul. Keep your conduct among the Gentiles honorable, so that when they speak against you as evildoers, they may see your good deeds and
glorify God on the day of visitation.
These are not important issues in the world.
The most important issues in the world, are not issues in our world.
We are sojourners and exiles…or are we? Or do we just blend in too well? What life are we living while we’re awake? What are we doing with the other five hours of our awakeness for the one hour of our careers? Why have we allowed the 1/8th of our life to govern and dictate our lives and the great commission God has given us? How can we expect to be full of His Glory when there is no time for his glory and we are full of our careers? Or so we have thought. And we wonder why we are successful to some degree but unfulfilled. .. We have this empty spot. We know there must be more…but it alludes us.
Can you see how too many have lost their souls? And for what?
In listening to an old sermon of John Piper taken from (1 Peter 2:12). He said, “The first issue is how the soul shall not be lost. The second issue is how God shall not be belittled. Or to make it positive: how the soul shall be saved, and how God shall be glorified.
The salvation of the soul and the glory of God are the
two biggest issues in the universe.
And they’re non-issues for most people in America. This text says, “The goal of all human behavior is to be the glory of God.” Isn’t that an incredibly sweeping statement?
The goal of all your behavior, from the time you get up in the morning until you go to bed at night, is to draw attention to God. That’s the significance of human life. The positive significance of human life consists of our capacity to deflect attention from ourselves to God.
That’s the meaning of human life as God intended it to be.
“If we don’t live for God’s glory, we become simply a little echo of a God-neglecting culture.”
If only 1/8 of our time is our career, isn’t there enough time to glorify God?
I’m not making that up. “Keep your conduct honorable so that the Gentiles might glorify God” (see 1 Peter 2:12). Live, conduct yourselves, act, and behave with a mind that asks,
“How can I direct their attention to God by the way I live?”
That’s what life is for. We live in order to get attention for God.
We fit in so well to this world that we can’t direct anybody’s attention
out of the world, which is where God is.
I just have the feeling that we’re so afraid of being Amish: dressing wrong, riding a horse-drawn carriage, being anti-modern, or getting the wrong tie, or not having a tan. We’re so afraid of not being in step, that we blend in too well, so that nobody’s saying, “Wow — look at God”… anymore".
Phil 1:9-12 “And it is my prayer that your love may abound more and more, with knowledge and all discernment, 10 so that you may approve what is excellent, and so be pure and blameless for the day of Christ, 11 filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ, to the glory and praise of God”.
That’s what life is for. We live in order to direct attention to God.
Kent Henry Flow through me.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JoNdo_PHDLE
