684 Who Do You Obey? - Romans 6:16

May 31, 2022

Are you now, or have you ever been a slave? Hi, I'm Mike Henry Sr. with Follower of One. Thanks for joining me again today on the Follower of One podcast. Today, I wanted to talk about Romans 6:16, "do you not know that when you present yourself to someone as slaves for obedience, you are slaves of the one whom you obey. Either of sin resulting in death or of obedience resulting in righteousness." That's Romans 6:16 from the New American Standard Bible.

 

Chances are when you came out of school and went to work, you submitted yourself to someone who was a boss, or it was yourself, or it was God. I don't think we do a good job of teaching Christian workers that we work for Jesus. I haven't done a comprehensive survey, but I see it happening, and it was that way in my career. I became a Christian after I had already entered the workforce. And it was a challenge for me to realize that my boss wasn't really my boss, Jesus was.

 

Jesus had assigned me to that particular workplace. This particular passage doesn't speak directly about bosses, but it is speaking about slaves. We can become slaves to ourselves, slaves to sin, slaves to our own choices. Either we're submitting to Jesus or we're submitting to ourself. We may have sold out and we're doing what a boss tells us to do and we're going through the motions of a job, or we could be totally locked in, pursuing our own goals and our own objectives and our own business.

 

Maybe it's the desire to pursue our own entrepreneurial efforts or to grow our own business. Maybe it's pursuit of hobbies. We can become a slave to our own wishes. That's who I was a slave to. And I still tend to become a slave to me, to my own comfort, to my own desires. I ask myself what I want, and then I go do that. But also I want us to think about something that happens when we leave school and go to work, because what we've done is we've left this world where we were being told what to do for the biggest chunk of what we did every day, now into a world where we're being told what to do in a work context.

 

But the rest of our life is ours. In some degree, we start training ourselves more and more and more to do what we want. We have more discretionary time than ever before. We also have more money and more obligations. As a result, I think many of us come out of school and we cement our own path towards satisfying ourselves. That we become our own God, if you will, because we now have more money than we ever had, but we have less time.

 

I was arrogant enough to know that I didn't want to become a slave of my bosses. I was in sales when I came right out of school and I started listening to myself and I wasn't a Christ follower, but after a short while, and we get in this habit of obeying ourselves, then we subject everything we know to what we think about it. I wonder the degree that figuring out work, and figuring out life by ourselves on our own, contributes to this sacred secular divide that we often see. So today I want to challenge us as Christians, as Christ followers, either we're listening to God with our whole life, or we're only listening to him in parts of it.

 

Who are we slaves to today? Are we slaves of sin, resulting in death? Or are we slaves of obedience, resulting in righteousness? Are we listening to Jesus or are we listening to the noise? Maybe it comes from inside us, maybe from our bosses, or from the world. That's our question today. Who are we listening to?

 

Thank you for being a marketplace minister, consider listening to the holy spirit as he guides you to interact with the lives and with the people that you work with. We can act in such a way that Jesus becomes visible in our work. All we have to do is begin with a little prayer, here I am. Why not pray that prayer today? Give yourself to Jesus and let him put you to work.

 

Thanks very much.