Work – Gregory Scott Blog

If Christians Did These 4 Things They Would Rule the World

If you haven’t picked up on it from this blog yet, I have an optimistic view of the future because I am a Kingdom man. I believe Isaiah when he said the knowledge of God will cover the earth as the waters cover the sea, and that the people will stream to the mountain of God. See Isaiah 2:2, 11:9.

I believe Daniel when he said the kingdom of God will crush and put an end to all these other kingdoms but that the kingdom of God will endure forever. Daniel 2:44.

I believe Jesus when He said the kingdom of God will leaven the entire world and become like a tree so that the even non-Christians will seek to nest under the shade of its branches. Matthew 13:31-33.

I read with interest the efforts to theologify (I made that word up) these beliefs into a system of strategies and tactics whether it be Christian Reconstruction, the Seven Mountain Mandate, or any of the efforts to express the idea that the world should run best when it is run by those who are obedient to King Jesus.

But while tactics and strategies are important, they are really useless if the people who are given the responsibility of carrying them out have not been trained to do the fundamentals first. Christians don’t need to understand the Seven Mountains or Christian Reconstruction to advance the kingdom of God.

If Christians only consistently did the following four things they would see the greatest advance of the kingdom of God since the first century:

Knowing God Through His Work

I manage a number of attorneys at my law firm. They are all different, but it’s amazing how who they are as people is reflected in their work.

As a friend of mine once said, “The way you do anything is the way you do everything.” A person who is fastidious in their work is so in their private life. The person who is cautious in their private life is cautious in their work. If you have ever managed people, you know what I am telling you is true.

I think we all know instinctively that our work product is an extension of who we are. That is why poor performance reviews and job terminations are so devastating. Sure, they can lead to adverse financial situations, but so can a bad turn of the stock market, but that doesn’t devastate people like getting fired.

We don’t see a termination as a business decision but an indictment on our person, regardless of whether it is called a reduction-in-force, right-sizing, dehiring, or whatever other euphemism is used to soften the blow.

The reverse is also true. When we do well in our work, and it is recognized, we take it personally, in a good way. People become workaholics not only because they are driven by money but because their good work affirms what they want to believe about themselves.

The Apostle Paul, writing to the Romans, says:

For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes,
His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly
seen, being understood through what has been made,
so that they are without excuse.
Romans 1:20

Kingdom Hero – George Washington Carver

George Washington Carver was born in 1864, into slavery, but through sheer determination, amplified by the power of God, he became one of the most important scientists of the 20th century. By the time he died in 1943 he was a legend.

Carver spent most of his adult life as a professor at the Tuskegee Institute in Tuskegee, Alabama, as the head of its Agriculture Department. As the boll weevil began to infest cotton crops throughout the Southern United States, people finally began to listen to Carver, who had encouraged farmers to diversify their crops so they were not so dependent upon cotton. At Carver’s insistence, farmers began to plant and harvest the peanut.

After praying and asking the Lord for insight about the universe and about mankind, the Lord encouraged Carver to focus on something smaller. He reminded Carver of Genesis 1:29 and specifically that He had given peanuts and other plants to mankind for their use. So Carver returned to his laboratory with some peanuts in hand and began studying them, breaking them down into their constituent parts and coming up with different uses for them. Carver would eventually come up with more than 300 uses for the peanut.

Carver did not care about money or personal acclaim. He would discover and develop ideas that could be used to start profitable businesses for new products, but instead of patenting those ideas, he made them freely available for the public good. He could have chosen to be a wealthy man by worldly standards, but he chose instead to be an effective man by Kingdom standards.

What led me to study Carver, and to his authorized biography by Rackham Holt, was to understand how Carver worked inspired by the Holy Spirit. He fully attributed his discovery of the many uses of the peanut to inspiration from the Lord, and I wanted to understand how he had gone about obtaining that inspiration.

Why the Interactions you Value the Least Matter the Most

This week someone in the IT department of my law firm died. No details were provided regarding the cause of his death, but it appeared his death was not unexpected even though he was only a middle-aged man.

Attorneys in the firm responded to the email of his death by recounting stories of how he had helped them with their computer issues, and how he was always patient with them. That was about as personal as it got.

At first it seemed sad to me that the best we could do was talk about his IT support skills, but then I realized that was the only way we knew him.

I’m sure his family knew him more fully as a person because they related to him as a husband, father, son, or sibling, but they are only a handful of people. We are a law firm of 750. In short, at work he was known more widely but less fully. And that is the case with most of us.

On Doing Your Work Wholeheartedly

The other night, I ate dinner at the hotel across the street. I ordered “The Gobbler,” which. as you guessed, is their version of the turkey sandwich. When it arrived, I was immediately disappointed. It was one of those triple-deckers, with an extra piece of bread in the middle, all-in-all about 5 inches thick.

They would have had to call the local fire department for the Jaws of Life to pry my mouth open wide enough for me to get a bite of this sandwich.

So there I sat trying to figure out how to get what should have been a simple turkey and cheese sandwich into my pie hole. Was I really supposed to eat it with a knife and fork?