Everybody has a job description. Regardless of who you are—a pastor, a church member, or a student—you have a job description. We all do. And they are nothing new. They’ve been with us since the beginning of history. Adam and Eve had a job description. Noah had a job description. Abraham, Moses and Saul too. They all had job descriptions.
But sometimes we get so immersed in fulfilling the details of our divinely-given job description, that we lose sight of the big picture. From time to time, we need to remind ourselves of the biblical pillars of our raison d’être, those structural pylons of the Christian life that give us a wide-angle view of the biblical mandates and help us to refocus and reenergize our efforts.
When it comes to summarizing biblical mandates, no one did it better than our Lord. He was able to get right to the core of things. Jewish history said that there were 613 laws that needed to be obeyed, but Jesus reduced them to two: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind” and “you shall love your neighbor as yourself“ (Matt 22:37, 39).
In the midst of the tyranny of our commitments, we would do well to boil down the plethora of our commitments to the very basics of God’s job description for us. In many respects, it’s not a job description, but a job prescription—a prescription mandated for us by the apostle Paul in 1 Corinthians 10:31 – 11:1. Cautioning the Corinthians about misusing their Christian liberties, he admonishes: “Whether then you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God. Give no offense, either to Jews or to Greeks or to the Church of God, just as I also please all men in all things, not seeking my own profit, but the profit of the many, so that they may be saved. Be imitators of me, just as I also am of Christ.” Read More
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