Last week, we focused on the importance of “resetting our time” by putting God in our life first, before anything and everything else.

This week, we’re going to, in many ways, continue in the same theme as last week, and looking how we can reset and refocus our energy in all of the other areas of our life. We believe that our time focused on God doesn’t have to end when we say “Amen” at the end of our morning devotionals. And today we’re going to see how.

That’s what leads us this weekend to an amazing passage in the book of Colossians. In Colossians 3:17, Paul writes:

And whatever you do, whether in word or deed, do it all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through Him. (NIV)

Notice the first part of that verse: “whatever you do, whether in word or deed.” According to this passage, everything can be done “in the name of” Jesus. Writes scholar Douglas Moo on this verse, “everything…should be governed by the consideration of what it means to live in the realm of the risen Christ….since we have put on [the] Lord, becoming as a community the ‘new self’ who is none other than Jesus, the totality of our existence must now be lived out with him constantly in mind” (Moo, The Letters to the Colossians and to Philemon).

Paul’s words are thus pretty amazing: there is a tendency in the Christian life these days to divide life according to the “sacred” and the “secular”; to believe that the time I spend in my devotional in the morning or in church is “secular,” but the time that I spend at work, at the gym, at school, etc. is secular, divorced from God and His influence. Paul says that that is not the reality. Everything we do is “sacred,” everything can be done for Jesus, everything is for His purpose.

When we truly grasp this, this necessarily changes how we go about our day. How are we living for God wherever we are? How are we furthering his purposes wherever we are? Later on in Colossians, Paul himself talks about the implications of this for work:

Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for human masters, 24 since you know that you will receive an inheritance from the Lord as a reward. It is the Lord Christ you are serving. (Col. 3:23-24 NIV)

Our work is transformed for the purposes of God.

What this means, therefore, is that we are called to connect what we do on a daily basis to a higher purpose. You may not think of your job, for example, as ministry, but if you are both living out Christian principles in your job AND you are helping to further God’s purpose in this world–love, peace, prosperity, generosity–you are glorifying God. God doesn’t just call people to church jobs, God calls people everywhere and everywhere we have the ability to use our talents to further God’s purposes in this world.

Too often, talks on using your “talents” in churches can take on the nature of “how can you serve what we are doing here at this church.” We want to change the conversation: God wants you where you are, doing what you are doing. How can you connect what you do on a daily basis to the greater purpose God has for this world? This is part of the key to finding fulfillment in what you do.