Gospel News — Sep-Dec 2013

references give the impression of a conscious effort to ensure that life is not lived in vain, that the labour of our lives is fruitful. This concern for achievement, to be fruitful and not live in vain, is pointedly relevant to our age, where life can be frittered away so easily in entertainment and endless social networking. The call of Christ is to be "fruitful", to concretely achieve, with all the associated mental effort that entails.

Salvation itself is a free gift, independent of works - Rom. 4:4; 6:21-23 draws the contrast between the free gift of God, and the wages paid by sin. We each receive the same penny a day. And yet there is a major emphasis in the New Testament upon works being judged and rewarded eternally (1 Cor. 4:4,5; 2 Cor. 5:10). There will be a `payment' or reward for our works (1 Cor. 3:10-15; Rev. 22:12). There is a direct connection between our works in this life and the nature of our eternity. The nature of our eternity will be in accordance with the nature of our work. If, e.g., we laboured long and hard for the salvation and spiritual growth of an individual, then to live eternally with them will be an eternal reward. A bad builder will be saved at the last day but his work shown to be shoddy (1 Cor. 3:15). What this means is that our work within the body of Christ has real and eternal results. This alone should inspire us to be minimalists in our secular lives and focus on what will have eternal result.

In one sense, the Lord Jesus has given us His work to do and has gone away to the "far country", to return and assess our work. In another, according to Jn. 14-16, He is actively present with us. The resolution is that we are indeed left to make our own decisions and structure our lives as we think best in order to do our Lord's work, and yet He is also very much with us in Spirit- if we perceive it. In this sense, Christ works through our work for Him, as He did through Paul's (Rom. 15:18). For "we are God's fellow-workers" (1 Cor. 3:9 RV; 2 Cor. 6:1; 1 Thess. 3:2). Because of this, our labour is His, and thus becomes ultimately meaningful. Even our secular lives and labour become part

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of God's work, if it is done as unto Him and directed toward the final end of being His work rather than our own. Hence Paul reflects that if he is allowed to live a few more years, "If it is to be life in the flesh, that means fruitful labour for me" (Phil. 1:22). Life in the flesh can be fruitful labour. And that had huge significance for the slaves who became Christians. They were not to think that they could only serve their Heavenly Lord in the tiny amount of `free time' they had. Nor are we to think that our service of God can only be `after hours'. How grateful those slaves would have been for this amazing feature of the life in Christ. Ordinary daily tasks become absorbed in the grand idea of serving the Lord. Paul writes of slaves or free men each having `a calling in which he was called' (1 Cor. 7:20)- and he uses this term elsewhere only about the calling to Christ we have received. Our `calling' in secular life is our calling to serve Christ. But we are not to think this means we are to just pay no attention to trying to consciously serve the Lord as directly as possible - for in this context he writes that "If you may [Gk. `have the possibility to'] be made free, then use it rather [also translated `better', `the more']" (1 Cor. 7:21). This is relevant to issues of career choice, early retirement, how far we get involved with our employment.

Life lived like this, the purpose driven life, therefore ultimately has no regrets at the end. Paul shows no regret for anything since his baptism. He also pays little attention to `the problem of suffering'. Instead he saw every suffering as being to an end, part of the Divine program of which he was a part. Instead of writing about `What I suffered for Christ', he more positively sees it all as `What Christ has done in me'. So what does all this mean? For the African or Asian peasant farmer, the European middle aged man trapped by mortgage payments he can't really meet, the American divorcee without maintenance for her young children, the unemployed invalid in Eastern Europe, the blind man in an underfunded care home in Lithuania, the Syrian refugee living illegally in Greece, the Australian in midlife crisis, the believer stumbling through the mire