POSITIVE WRITTEN SERMON – A New Labor Day Commitment

POSITIVE WRITTEN SERMON - A New Labor Day Commitment

Time Sensitivity: The Sunday before Labor Day

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When God works through you in your job, it makes the hours breeze by, and the tasks easy.

In a small town, there is small restaurant that has a unique, antique collector’s clock in the main dining hall. Above the clock is a sign that says: “This is a very special clock, but it will never be stolen because our employees are watching it closely.”

Have you ever had a job like that, when you go in and immediately notice that the time is 9:02 a.m.? Then you look up and notice it is 9:07. It takes forever to get to 10 o’clock. You wonder if the day will ever end. Have you ever gone to work in the morning, dreading the day?

The pollster, Lou Harris, says that the average American works 30% more today than in 1973 (just 40 years ago) and has 32% less free time per week. They say 65% of the top managers in this country work more than 50 hours a week. Most executives work 10 hours a day (not eight), and 18% work 12 or more hours a day to get done what they feel they need to get done.

There is a great story about Kemmons Wilson, Sr., founder of Holiday Inns. He was asked to give a commencement speech at the high school he once attended. Wilson, who did not graduate from high school, told the graduating students: “I really don’t know why I’m here; I never got a degree, and I’ve only worked half-days my entire life. I guess my advice to you is to do the same. Work half-days, every day. And it doesn’t matter which half – the first twelve hours or the second twelve hours.”

When you love your job, and allow God to work through you, your no longer a clock watcher.

Spiritually we must change the way we are doing our jobs INSIDE of ourselves.

We should dread less, and work from our more. Work from more of God, the spiritual consciousness that brings joy to every task. Through the power of God coming through us, we will have more inspiration and more God-given power, and things will go better because we will have a new, unseen partner working with us.

Your day should be God-joy filled. You spend so many hours at work. It is meant to be something that brings out your Divine God-given talents and Divine potential. In order for this to happen, you have to allow God to come through.

In old movies of the 20s and 40s you see the portrayal of the business tycoon. It is always the same. He is sort of an overweight gentleman who smokes a cigar. He is always rushing from here to there and never has time for anybody. He is mean. And whenever he deals with his employees, he is always screaming and filled with tension. What a bad role model for the man or woman in the workplace. It does not have to be this way.

We should go to work with joyous God ordained power. We should inspire others with joyous power. We need to master the art of “easy does it,” so things do not bother us, where problems roll off our backs, like water off a duck’s back, and where things do not dismay us so much.

No one ever burned out from hard work. People burn out from resistance. For instance, if I had a wire going from me to you, we could run all the voltage through it we wanted. We could run five times the amount of current that the wire is supposed to be able to carry. But the moment we put a resistor in that line, it catches fire and burns up. The resistor is in your own mind.

When you go to work on Monday morning, no matter what you are doing, the resistor may be in your mind. We need to remove the resistors and allow the flow of God’s love for what we are doing to naturally occur.

How do we do that? Here are 10 rules for taking the hard way out of your journey and replacing it with the easy way, once and for all:

1. Life is too serious to be taken seriously. Do not get the idea that you are Atlas, carrying the world and your job around on your shoulders, that you are the only one in the world who can do this. God can carry it better.

Right now, this minute, plan to take your career burdens off of you for the week. Those burdens do not have to be carried by you. I do not care what kind of projects you have to do, or what kind of tremendous deadline is upon you, allow God to do it through you. With that mind-set alone, everything is going to change. You are not going to strain so hard when you do not take yourself so seriously.

Psychologist Dr. Arthur Stone conducted a study of 100 people over a three-month period of time. He found that when something bad happened to them at work, their immune system was significantly weakened for that day. The good news is that when something good happened, the immune system was strengthened and increased for the next two days.

So if you have a good day tomorrow, whether unexpectedly or if you make it happen, your immune system will be positively affected until Wednesday.

2. Be determined to like your work – this was one of the keys. If you decide early on that you do not like a certain job, that will become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Instead of deciding that you are going to become more and more miserable, each day on the job, determine to like your work. You will like any work that you do with God.

You HAD looked with your eyes and found things to be miserable about; NOW, you look for the good. Then, over a period of time, your job will become a pleasure and not drudgery.

Perhaps, you do need to change your job, but change yourself on your present job. Ask God to show you a new thing to love. That love will multiply. Love what you do, and it will attract other good into your career.

Once there was a town in which all the inhabitants were blind. A king, with his entourage, arrived one day with a mighty elephant, which he used to impress his subjects. The people of the town were anxious to find out what an elephant was like and sent three of its blind members to investigate. Since none of them had ever seen an elephant, they groped sightlessly with their hands, gathering information by touching some part of the elephant.

When they returned to their fellow citizens, they were asked about the shape of the elephant. The man who had touched an ear said, “It is a large, rough thing, wide and broad, like a rug.” The one who had felt the trunk said, “No, I have the real facts about it. It is a straight and narrow pipe, awful and destructive.” The man who felt the leg said, “It is mighty and firm, like a pillar.” All were right in their own way, but all were blinded to the total picture.

Pray to view your job in a new way.

Yes, you have a certain opinion of your job. But is this the whole picture of the job? Is there another view that could be taken? Are you blind to the good? Is there anyone else in the same environment that is having fun? Get the whole picture from the ONE that can see the whole picture.

So often, when we see people who are miserable, they have a focus like a magnifying glass on the negative, instead of seeing all the positive potential and possibilities that are everywhere around them.

3. Plan your work and work your plan, with God’s help. I think the greatest example of having a plan in life is what I learned from some kids when they took a canoe out onto a lake. They were paddling on the lake. They wanted to go toward the shore, but one was paddling one way and the other way paddling in the opposite way. Pretty soon, the canoe started to go in a circle. The canoe went one way and then, the other. It was a long ride, and they never did go where they wanted to go in the beginning.

If they had just kept their eyes on where they wanted to go and paddled toward it, and not let any other direction come into focus, they would have arrived, refreshed, and not tired. They would have been exhilarated because of the fun time they had.

Sometimes, life is like that because we do not have a plan. We go into work on Monday morning and we feel so swamped that we do not know where to begin. It just overwhelms us. We are filled with daily interruptions that make it hard to get the job done. We cannot take the overwhelming feeling it gives us IF we are trying to do it alone.

4. Do not try to do everything at once. If you feel like a hamster in a cage, running on the wheel and not getting anywhere, chances are it is because you are trying to do too many things at once.

Look at one thing, and heed the advice of the Bible. The Bible says, “This one thing I do,” and you do it. You may not know how to do it, but you ask God for strength, power, and wisdom in the way to proceed with that one thing, and God will tell you how to do it.

5. Get a correct mental attitude. Remember that ease or difficulty in your work depends upon how you think about it. If you think it is hard, I guarantee you it will be hard. If you think it is easy, it tends to become easy.

I am going to ask you to have GMA–God Mental Attitude. This is belief in more than your own abilities this is reliance on miracles that turns the impossible into the possible. God knows that you will do it. God knows it can be easy for you. God knows more about your job than you do. God certainly knows more about the career path to success than you do. God knows more about everything. We simply need to get that attitude inside of us and allow the Divine Spirit to come through. We need to say, “Okay, this one thing seems like a mountain to me. I do not know how to proceed on this, but I know You do, God. I am willing to take the action You tell me what to do and You tell me the way I should go. I am not going to resist. I am actually going to have Your mental attitude inside of me.”

God is love. Worshiping God you must have love for the one thing you are doing, and not allow any resistance in your work. Through love, allow this one thing to come through you with ease.

In his book, “The Prophet,” Kahlil Gibran said, “Work is love made visible. And if you cannot work with love, but only with distaste, it is better that you should sit at the gate of the temple and take alms of those who work with joy.”

When you go into work, you bring something to it – your joy and your love, and then you bring your talent. Then you add all that to the genius of God.

6. Become efficient in your work. Knowledge is power over your confusion in your career. It is easier to do a thing right. The hardest times you have had in your life have been when you have tried to do something wrong, and kept on doing it wrong. Soon you got proficient in doing it wrong, and doing it wrong became a habit. It takes 150 times more energy to keep the wheel of wrong moving as the wheel of right.

When you allow God to come through you, you do it right the first time without excuses. God could guide you continuously.

Can you imagine if Shakespeare said to himself, “I can’t write because I don’t have a computer.” No, he had a bird’s feather. If he had said, “Well, I only have a bird’s feather and an ink that’s not very good and that smears all the time. If only they would give me the right equipment, I could do great things and write in great ways.” He did not do that. He used what he had, loved what he had, and allowed that Spirit of God to come through him. We must do it the same way. With God we can do it right, and we can do it right the very first time.

7. Practice being relaxed. Tomorrow morning, when you go into your job, I want you to practice being relaxed. Practice as if you were going to the pool to swim a little and float and look up at the sky. You feel so relaxed. I want you to feel just as relaxed tomorrow morning at 9 a.m., in your workplace, or in your school.

It is possible; it is probable, with God. You do not have to bring resistance where you are. You can bring vacation with you. You can bring relaxation with you. It is easy and it can be accomplished. Some people only get two weeks of vacation the entire year – that is so sad. Vacation is doing what you are doing, when God is doing it through you.

We are the only species that retires – we retire, because we are tired, not from hard work, but from our resistance.

Have you ever walked through a cemetery? It is not morbid at all. Walk around cemeteries and look at the headstones. You can learn a lot about life from that. You learn when you look at a headstone and you think, “What was that person worried about? Did he/she have struggles on the job? Did it really do them any good to worry? What if they would have smiled, laughed, and loved through their lives? You can learn a lot from a cemetery. You can learn that you do not have to struggle and strain so much. You can have fun. And if God is your unseen partner, why not? Use your faith in God, and it will build your faith inside of you. Learn to practice the law of “easy does it.” Learn not to press or tug; learn to take everything in stride.

Let me tell you a story:

Negotiations between union members and their employer were at an impasse. The union denied what the company said – those workers were flagrantly abusing their contract’s sick-leave provisions. One morning, at the bargaining table, the company’s chief negotiator held aloft the morning edition of the newspaper. “This man,” he announced, “called in sick yesterday.” There, on the sports page, was a photo of the supposedly ill employee, who had just won a local golf tournament with an excellent score. There was absolute silence in the room for what seemed like a long time.

A union negotiator broke the silence in the room, “Wow,” he said, “Think of what kind of score he could have had if he hadn’t been sick!”

Question: What would you be worth in the workplace if God took our place tomorrow morning? God can come in and through you now. Your rewards, you are no longer sick, your career path becomes a joy and a daily ease.

8. Discipline yourself not to put off until tomorrow what you can do today. Do you know where the word “discipline” is from? It is from the same root as the word “disciple,” which means to become a disciple of Christ. Tomorrow, think that Jesus Christ is in your position. Every person who comes into Jesus Christ’s presence is not seen with the old eyes of the flesh, but with the eyes of Jesus Christ. How would Jesus treat this person? What would Jesus think about your boss? Or, if you are a boss, what would Jesus think about your employees? How do things change just in one day? They will change because you have this Mind in you that was in Christ Jesus.

9. PRAY about your work. Pray about every small and large detail of your work. Do not do your work alone. Whenever we try to do anything alone, we may mess it up, or at the least it may be a lot worse than if we would team up with God. But when we pray about it, when we are open to God, and good things always happen. We will stand back and say, “Wow!” What happens through me and through the events is miraculous through the Divine order of the day.

10. Take on an “unseen partner.” Make God your unseen full partner. Do not try to do any task or meet any deadline by yourself. You will burn out if you do. The human mind has more resistors in it than anything else. But God Mind coming through you does not know resistance. God will allow it to come through you so easily, without a burden.

At 5 o’clock, in the afternoon, you should have more energy than you had at 9 o’clock, in the morning. You should be filled with love for your boss, fellow employees, and customers. You should not have one bad thought about anything that happened during the day when you go home. Instead, spend the evening in awe thinking about what has happened with God coming through you.

God will take the load off of you. God is as much at home in your job, your workplace, your store, your factory, your office, as God is right here in this ministry. Tomorrow morning, you report to work with a new God-given attitude. You work in a job-share program, with you and God equally sharing the task. And you work, realizing that God is doing 90% of the work. You are just showing up and agreeing to allow it to happen through you and around you.

Let us pray:

I pray that in some way my humble words today, create a spark in you of something that will begin to happen tomorrow morning. As you report to work with God, you have a smile inside of you and a joy that radiates from the innermost realm of your being. You no longer need to struggle and strain. God has developed an ability within you, as never before, to work through you. I decree, in Jesus Christ’s name, that your talents will be increased 150-fold. I decree, in Jesus Christ’s name, that you will be 150% more effective in your job because there is a new employee on the job – an employee who loves the work and loves what is happening (the new you). This employee knows only one thing – how to succeed in God’s perfection.

I give thanks for this occurring in you and through you.

It is so, in Jesus Christ’s name … Amen.

PRAYER / MEDITATION_______________________________

This time is sacred. It is our opportunity to connect with God. We realize that we have the power to do just that. You are now in the presence of pure being, immersed in the Holy Spirit of life, love, and wisdom. You acknowledge God’s presence and power. You acknowledge God’s Divine wisdom.