Sermon Transcript
Isn’t it great that our Father, our Heavenly Father, gave us the scriptures so that we might know him better and know his goodness, know who he is, have a relationship with him, but also that we might know each other, that we might love each other, that we might love him, we might love each other. And of course, this life is built around those 2 dimensions, the upward dimension and the horizontal dimension. Well, we’re going to come back to his scriptures this morning. We’re in Colossians chapter 4. If you have your Bible, I invite you to turn there with me.
We’re just going to look at one verse. We’re doing a 2-part series that we started last week. We focused on the employee, and today we focus on the employer in this whole matter of work. We call this, um, Wow at Work. And wouldn’t it be wonderful if the employees wowed their boss and the boss wowed the employee.
And so we’ve been looking at these 2 dimensions, and today we’ll just primarily focus on the leadership of a boss. Now, you may not be a boss, but you may have oversight responsibilities in some capacity. You might be a parent, a mom, a dad, a grandparent, and there’s some oversight responsibilities there. The, the teaching that you do, the coaching, the mentoring that you do, maybe just guiding somebody. There are lots of ways that we are given oversight responsibility, so this passage can not just have application to the master-slave relationship, which as far as I know, that’s not going on anywhere in the building, hopefully.
But there still is an application or principle here that we’re going to look at this morning. And hopefully what we’re going to see will help us be better overseers, better bosses, better employers, or better at this parenting thing or teaching or whatever, whatever it is. I want you just to think for a minute about a boss that you’ve been under that wowed you. This is a boss that you praise, you sang their praises, you were grateful for this person. You looked forward to being at work because of this boss.
You looked forward to the meetings because of this boss. You know, this is just an amazing person. I think back to my second job. My first job, I wouldn’t say that boss was a great boss. His name was Sam.
I— the sooner I could get out of there, it was going to be a happy day for me. So it wasn’t Sam that was a great boss, but Mark, the second job I had, he was a great boss. Mark Hall at Mark Hall’s Chevron. Yes, I used to work at a gas station. It was a part of my high school education.
I used to be the guy that would run out and put gas into the car. Yes, there was a day where people would actually come to your car and gas your car up for you. And I did that. I not only did that because Mark, my boss, told me that I should also wash the windshields of every car that came in. So I did that.
And I checked the oil on most of the cars that came in and also even checked the tires, the pressure in the tires. That was just all part of the full service. You’ve heard of a full-service service station? I worked at a full-service service station. But I worked for a great boss, somebody who cared about his employees.
Somebody who cared about his product, somebody who cared about his customer. In fact, when you think about a boss, those are really 3 areas that a boss needs to care about, right? A boss needs to care about the employees, a boss needs to care about the product, and a boss needs to care about the customer or the customers. When you get to the passage we’re focused on this morning, actually only one of those dimensions comes into focus in terms of God’s concern for employers. It’s not that he’s not concerned about these other matters, but in this particular passage, there’s one primary concern that he wants those that he’s writing to to focus on.
Colossians 4:1 puts it this way, Masters, provide your slaves with what is right and fair, because you know that you also have a Master in heaven. So, just taking a look at the screen there for a minute, what’s the relationship here? It’s the boss’s relationship in this passage Primarily to one’s employees. So the focus we’re going to focus on this morning then is this whole relationship that you have to those people who are working under you, the responsibility that you have to them, whether it’s a team, whoever it is. You want to be a great boss.
You want to be a boss that people are thankful for, that they love working with. You want to be the boss where everybody would like to work with this boss. That’s the boss that you want to be. That’s the boss that I want to be. And this passage really helps us move in that direction.
This passage is going to help us move away from what Archibald Hart has written about in his book called Crazy Making Workplace. Often that is the case, a crazy-making workplace, and sometimes we end up working for crazy-making bosses. He described— Archibald Hart described a crazy-making boss this way: He said, a lousy boss can kill your happiness, destroy your self-esteem, suffocate your individuality, poison your mind, threaten your sanity, and deaden your ambitions. That about gets at it, doesn’t it? And you’re looking at that and you say, I don’t think I want to work for that boss, and I certainly don’t want to be that boss.
And I don’t think Paul has in mind us also being that boss or You know, we don’t want to be that person. So what he does here is he gives us a description of how to be the boss that ultimately brings pleasure to God and to others. I find here in Matthew— excuse me, Colossians 4:1, essentially 3 mandates for masters, 3 mandates for masters. Here’s the first one: do what’s right. He says, masters, provide your slaves with what is right.
Now, of course, just put it into the context. What’s right is that a master treats the slave or slaves as people, as people, as human beings. These are people who are made in the image of God. So, the idea here is that this master needs to see those who are working for him as humane, not inhumane. He’s not to treat them in inhumane ways, but humane ways.
Treat them as God would treat them. That’s the picture here. We’re going to see in just a minute that the word righteous is actually connected to loving care. And there are a lot of matters that we can look at when we talk about doing the right thing towards somebody who’s working for you, but certainly this whole matter of caring for them properly, showing them loving care, comes to the top of a list. And those that we work with.
It should come to the top of the list. I was looking at a speech that General Melvin Zeiss gave at the Armed Forces Staff College. So he’s communicating to a group of soldiers, to a group of commanding officers, and this is what he said to them: The one piece of advice which I believe will contribute more to making you a better leader and commander is that you must care. How do you know if you care? Well, for one thing, if you care, you listen to your junior officers and your soldiers.
To care, you must listen, really listen. And he goes on to say, if you care, if you go in the mess hall and you notice that the scrambled eggs are in a puddle of water and 20 pounds of toast has been done in advance and it’s all lying there hard and cold and the bacon is is lying there dripping in grease and the cold pots of coffee are sitting on the tables getting even colder, if that really bothers you, if it really gripes you, you care. And if you really like soldiers, if you really like them, you care. You need to like them, he said, and you need to feel good about being with them. And then he said, what this world needs desperately is more leaders who care, more leaders who listen, More leaders who really like those they lead.
See what he’s saying? He’s connecting it. This is a military commander, and you might not think, you know, military commanders should care about those under their care, but yet he’s saying that’s absolutely the case. These are people that we need to care about, and we care about them by listening and by liking them. I was reading a blog that was written by someone in this church.
It came out this week on LinkedIn. And this is in part what this person wrote about the team that he works with. He said, my style is based solely on the true desire to not just build a relationship or connection based on a common interest or a passion in something that they like, but I also genuinely care about other people’s lives and perspectives and what journeys they have been on to get them to where they are today. They aren’t just employees to me. They aren’t just, you know, people that are doing the job.
I care about them. I want to know what’s going on in their life. A great boss is somebody who’s going to do the right thing by caring, by lovingly caring for those that work for you. Wouldn’t you agree? I mean, certainly most of us sitting in the room would say right now, I really want my boss to care.
I want my boss to care about what I’m doing. You know, this figure that’s here just to get the job done. I want my boss to care. Secondly, he says, provide your slaves with what is right and then secondly fair. When he’s talking about fair, he’s talking about treating the employee with fairness.
Fairness. Now, that word could be translated in the original language here as equitable, or it could be translated as even-handed. The word fair or fairness is actually used in 2 Corinthians 8:13-14 in the context where Paul is writing and he’s urging the Corinthians to give, that they should be giving an appropriate amount of their income to the need of others in churches around them. And so he says this, our desire, 2 Corinthians 8:13-14, our desire is not that others might be relieved while you’re hard-pressed, But that there might be equality. And this word equality is the same word that’s found here in Colossians 4:1 for fair.
That there might be— so he could have translated it, there might be fairness. At the present time, your plenty will supply what they need so that in turn their plenty will supply what you need, and then there will be equality. And again, it’s the same word. It could be translated fairness. So what Paul’s going after here is fairness in giving.
If the church at Macedonia is giving from the little that they have, certainly you should be giving as well, because that’s what equality is all about. It’s not one group giving and not the other, but it’s you taking your turn. In all fairness, it’s you taking your turn and being responsible toward these needs. So it’s in the context of money. That’s what I want you to see.
It’s in the context of giving. But it’s in the context of equity. And Paul here is speaking— when he talks about fairness, he’s talking about equity in pay, or we would call this fair pay. You’ve heard that term before, fair pay. And so a boss, he’s saying, needs to have in mind this whole matter of fair pay.
You need to pay what is fair. So pay fair wages. Now it’s fascinating, that subject comes into play in a passage found in the Old Testament, 1 Kings chapter 5. And actually this whole chapter is kind of playing this out. We don’t have time to look at the whole chapter, but I want to just touch on verses 6, 7, and 8.
1 Kings chapter 5, verses 6, 7, and 8. The context is Solomon, who is David’s son, King David’s son. This is King Solomon. King Solomon is charged with building the temple. So he’s Just imagine having been given that task, you know, whether it’s from God or a boss or whoever it is, but the task of building the first temple for God.
And so Solomon knows he’s not going to be able to get this job done alone, even through his own peoples. He’s got to go outside and get some others to help him, and he needs some expert help from others as well. So he contacts King Hiram. And he gave this directive to King Hiram in 1 Kings, chapter 5, verse 6, so give orders that cedars of Lebanon be cut for me. My men— this is Solomon’s men— will work with yours— that’s Hiram’s men— and I will pay you for your men whatever wages you set.
You know that we have no one so skilled in felling timber as the Sidonians. When Hiram heard Solomon’s message, he was greatly pleased, and he said, praise be to the Lord today, for he has given David a wise son to rule over this great nation. So Hiram sent word to Solomon, I have received the message you sent me, and I will do all you want in providing the cedar and the pine logs. Now essentially what you have there is a directive that’s coming from King Solomon toward a person who can get the job done. All right, he realizes that Hiram’s got some people that are skilled and, you know, cutting down trees is the picture here, and he needs them to come and to do the job.
So they’re negotiating the contract essentially. They’re negotiating what’s going to happen at this point. It’s kind of like what we did as we were getting into remodeling this building. We worked with a company called Visioneering, and essentially what we did was we contacted Visioneering and we said, we need your help. We know that you guys are great at lights, lighting systems, and You’re great at the audio systems and all this visual stuff.
And so we need your help, we need your training, we need your skill. And they agreed that they would do it. And so we negotiated a contract at a certain price, and they got going on the project. And as they’ve been working, we’ve been paying them to the completion date and all of that. Well, that’s just fair, right?
That’s just the thing that you do. You contract somebody, you contract them at a certain wage, an amount that’s been agreed upon. It would always be wonderful if it was like this, where basically you just, you know, Solomon said here, hey, whatever you guys want, just tell me. Now, that would be a great contract, wouldn’t it? Yeah, I’d love to just tell you whatever I want.
But the point is, is that there’s some kind of an agreement on pay, on an amount, and this pay is going to be— listen to this— it’s going to be commensurate with the skill level. Because the reason he’s going outside at this point is because they don’t have the skills in-house to be able to do what the project was that was before them. So, they’re going to pay according to skill. Essentially, what this is telling us is that pay for skill, fair pay for skill, is appropriate. It’s proper.
It needs to happen. And so, all the way back over here to Colossians chapter 4, you’ve got these masters, and as we said last week, in that kingdom, in the Roman Empire, many people were slaves, but some of the people put themselves in slavery as employers to companies, just like we would be employed by a company. It happened in families. They sold themselves into families so that they might have a wage. And he’s saying to them, You need to do what is right.
You need to do what is fair. Don’t renege. Don’t hold back on this. You need to care as an employer about the pay levels of the people that are under you. Have you heard of the name Charlie Steinmetz?
Steinmetz built the generators for the Henry Ford automobile plant in Dearborn, Michigan, the first automobile plant there. There was an assembly line that these generators, you know, produced the energy for so that they could build these cars. And evidently, they said things were working fantastic after they installed this equipment. However, one day everything without warning stopped. Production came to a complete cease and the place went dark.
One mechanic after another tried to fix the problem but could not fix the problem in-house. So Ford, in frustration, went to the designer and the brain behind the system, Charlie Steinmetz. According to smithsonian.com, after Steinmetz arrived on the scene, he rejected all assistance. So all these engineers that were there, he said, I don’t need you. I just need 3 things.
I need a notebook, I need a pencil, and I need a cot. And the cot was going to be for his rest, but also the fact that he was going to spend the next 2 days— he ended up spending 2 days in the plant working on this project, trying to figure out what was wrong with the generator. And after 2 straight days, they said, listening to the gigantic generator, he scribbled down some computations on a notepad, and then he climbed up on the generator and he made a chalk mark on the generator on one particular side. And then he told the engineers from Ford that they needed to remove the plate that was up there at the location where he had made the chalk mark and then go inside and replace 16 windings from the field coil. Well, they did that, and after they did that, the place came back to life.
It performed to perfection. Cars were coming back off of the line. Well, of course, Henry Ford was thrilled about all of this until he got the bill. The bill arrived. It was $10,000.
Ford couldn’t believe it. He didn’t, you know, think that what Charlie had done was that big of a deal. So he asked Charlie for an itemized bill. Steinmetz sent the bill back, and this is what it said: making the chalk mark on the generator, $1. Knowing where to make the mark, $9,999.
Yeah, now that’s fair pay, right? It’s connected to skill level, it’s connected to expertise, and it needs to be something that’s taken into account. What is that telling us? What’s this passage telling us? There’s a big push right now for equity in pay.
You know who also is pushing for equity in pay? It’s God. It truly is. I mean, should we care about equity in pay? Should we care when there’s a man and a woman and they’re doing the same job?
Should we care about equity in pay? You better believe it. God does. So we should do what’s right. We should pay fair wages.
And then there’s a third matter that comes into play here. It says, masters, provide for your slaves with what’s right and fair, because you know that you also have a Master in heaven. See, the people he’s writing to are actually now Christ followers. These are people, yes, they still have slaves, and that’s a whole nother matter, but he’s writing to these masters and he’s saying to them, there is an appropriate way to treat your employees. It is in remembering your heavenly Father that you will treat your employees as you should.
What this tells us, number one, is that they’re connected to God. They have willingly surrendered their life to a new master. This master is God. If you’ve never come to the place where you have recognized that there is a master, there is a God, and this God sent his Son Jesus Christ into the world to die on the cross for our sins, if you have never recognized that, that’s where this whole thing starts if you’re going to get this perspective that God wants you to get. It starts with the willingness first to surrender to the Master, to the Master Designer, to the Boss of bosses.
But in surrendering to God, there is also a willingness to emulate our God. And that’s really the thought here in this last part of this verse. It’s a willingness to emulate the Lord in the work we do. We want to be the boss. To others that God is to us.
And so in knowing our God, we want to do the same thing that God would toward people. And what do we know that God does? Well, Psalm 145:17 says, the Lord is righteous in all his ways, and he’s loving toward all that he has made. And there’s the connection. Do you see the correlation between righteous and loving?
That if we are righteous, if we are doing what is righteous or right toward others, we’re going to be loving. We’re going to treat them with loving compassion, or there will come loving care from us toward them. They aren’t just an object to be used. These are people created in the image of God. And in the same way that our heavenly Father sees us as people created in his image, in his righteousness, He loves us.
He loves all of those that he has made. So we know that and we remember that then in our leadership. But secondly, we also know that our God is a God of fair pay. Psalm 62:12 says, love to you, Lord God, you pay a fair wage for a good day’s work. God pays what’s appropriate.
And if there’s work that’s been done, then we need to do what it is that he does, and that is he pays a fair wage. So what he’s saying to an employer or to somebody who has oversight responsibility is you need to look up at your Master in heaven, and as one who longs to please this Master in heaven, you need to be like your Master in heaven. Do that which is right. Love those that are under your care and do that which is right in giving them the pay that they deserve. Masters on earth should be the same kind of bosses that our Master in heaven is.
The outcome? Well, workplaces then will be a better place, won’t they? We’ll turn out to be the kind of bosses that people want to work for. Now, I think we could stop this series right here and we could just say, okay, all right, that was a nice homily, you know, we could just move on. But I want you to just give some reflection thought to this.
So we’re going to just take a few minutes, we’re going to reflect on this. We’re going to reflect on it through a movie, actually. But I want you to just give some reflection thought to this, to the fact that God is deeply concerned about what happens in our work. It’s of great interest to him because who we work for and how we work and how— what we expect of others who work for us, that is an opportunity to potentially impact people for life, for a lifetime, and possibly even for an eternity. And so, the matters that are focused on in these passages here are matters to not just simply, eh, but to actually say, you know, that’s the kind of person I want to be.
I want to be a boss. Who does what is right by lovingly caring for the people that I have the opportunity to lead. I want to be a boss who gives fair pay. I want to take into consideration these— I want to do what’s right toward my employees. I want to do my best to treat those that I’m responsible for as God treats me.
I want to keep that in mind. I want to remember how he treats me. I want I want to do my best in this job. There was a movie that came out back in 1960— excuse me, 1995 called Mr. Holland’s Opus. Some of you may have saw the movie.
Can’t go down to Blockbuster Video anymore and rent it, but maybe you’ve got it sitting around home somewhere, or maybe you saw it way back. And others of you have no idea what I’m talking about right now. But this movie is about this, this man who has this dream of composing a musical that one day he would lead in concert halls and under the shining lights. And, you know, that’s his dream. But what happens is, is his dream is never realized.
It doesn’t happen. He ends up in obscurity teaching music in a high school. And this was a real challenge at the beginning, you know, music in a high school. And yet as the whole thing went along, he began to teach these high school students to love music and to play it and learn how to play it. And there was this incredible connection that was made between him and the students.
Well, at the end of that career, 30 years, he’s kind of left to wonder So what’s the point? You know, what difference did it make? And we’re going to pick up the movie. We’re going to go to the movies here for a few minutes. We’re going to pick up the movie on his last day on the school campus.
He’s been in the classroom where primarily he spent most of his time. It’s empty now. His wife and son— his son is deaf, by the way. You’ll see some sign language going on, and that’s connected to the fact that the son is deaf. Have just been in the classroom helping, you know, pack things away, and they’re then going to walk out of the classroom and perhaps just walk away from this whole thing forever.
So watch what happens.
Now, what is that? Um, I don’t know. What, you can’t hear what’s going on in the auditorium? Oh yeah, I, I hear it. Well, there’s something going on in there that isn’t supposed to be.
Well, it could be summer programs. No, the summer programs don’t start for another couple of weeks.
Settler? I wouldn’t have missed him, Mr. Howell.
Uh, hello. Um, our master of ceremonies seems to be a little late, so I guess it’s up to me to begin. Um, when word first got out that the music program was cut and about the retirement of my husband, well, I’ve never seen such a response from the community. Oh, looks like my watch is fast. Uh, ladies and gentlemen, may I present our governor and Kennedy High School alumnus, the Most Honorable Gertrude Lang.
It’s been a long time.
Thank you so much. Thank you.
My apologies for my tardiness. And, uh, Principal Walters, I’d like you to know, yes, I brought a note from my mother.
Mr. Holland had a profound influence on my life, on a lot of lives I know. And yet I get the feeling that he considers a great part of his own life Rumor had it he was always working on this symphony of his, and this was going to make him famous, rich, probably both. But Mr. Holland isn’t rich, and he isn’t famous, at least not outside of our little town. So it might be easy for him to think himself a failure. And he would be wrong, because I think he’s achieved a success far beyond riches and fame.
Look around you. There is not a life in this room that you have not touched, and each one of us is a better person because of you. We are your symphony, Mr. Holland. We are the melodies and the notes of your opus, and we are the music of your life.
Mr. Holland, we would now like to give something back to you, to you and to your wife, who along with you has waited 30 years for what we’re about to hear. If you will, would you please come up here and take this baton and lead us in the first performance ever of the American Symphony by Glenn Holland?
I would have shown you the rest of it, but it’s just going to be another 5 minutes. But you get the point, don’t you? We are your symphony. We are the melodies and notes of your opus. We are the music of your life.
So that’s what it wasn’t— it wasn’t what he had in mind. He had in mind a musical composition that would impact the world.
But what was handed to him was something different than he ever imagined. He made the best of it.
That person you’re overseeing— I don’t know what the context is, I don’t know what the situation is, I don’t know if it’s anywhere close to what it was you hoped life would be for you. You feel like you’re in obscurity. I don’t know what your circumstance is. All I know is that we have the opportunity, and in some ways you more than me, in the communities that you live, in the work that you do, we have the opportunities to impact the lives of people. And that’s what’s most important.
So this series on work isn’t just something that, ugh. No, God deeply cares about us as workers, how we work, the people we work with, the people we work under, the people who work for us. He cares deeply about all of that. And all of that, all of that is an opportunity for us to make an impact in the lives of people. To God’s glory and for others’ good.
Let’s pray. Lord, we are so grateful that the Scriptures speak to us right where we are, and even again today we see that in this passage where you care about those who are in positions of leadership and responsibility, and you want them to be people who others love. Not love to hate, but love. And we pray that we would be the kinds of people that ultimately represent you well. So help us, Lord.
Help us with these responsibilities that you’ve given to us. And in some cases where we’re doing something we never imagined we would be gifted or tasked with, in your plan, it’s part of what you want to do through us. And so help us embrace it and help us see the value of what we’re doing and the opportunity of what we do. And may we embrace it to the fullest. May there come magnum opus outcomes through the work that is done.
I pray that for each person in this room this morning. I pray that you’d help us go into our work this week with even a renewed perspective and a renewed purpose and, and with a better understanding of the privilege and opportunities that we have. I ask for your just divine intervention in all of our lives. And Lord, if there’s anybody here that’s not yet in your family, we pray today would be the day of salvation for them. They would say yes to you as the Master.
If that’s in your heart this morning, tell God that. He’ll hear that prayer. Lord, I’ve been living my life like I was the master.
Forgive me. I want to come under your headship, your lordship. Change me. I ask that you’d forgive me of my sins. Adopt me into your family.
Thank you for what your Son Jesus Christ did for me, and as he gave this life as a gift, I want to receive it this morning. God will hear that prayer. Lord, whatever it is that you want us to take from this service, help us take it with us this week that we might be the people that you want us to be. For we pray this in Jesus’ name. Amen.
