An Article by Jamie Johnson
The only thing required to make something holy is for God to be there in the midst of it. In Exodus 33:15-16, Moses told the Lord, “If your Presence does not go with us, do not send us up from here. How will anyone know that you are pleased with me and with your people unless you go with us? What else will distinguish me and your people from all the other people on the face of the earth?” It is God’s Presence— His face to face interaction with us— that makes us or any situation special.
For the majority of people, God sends us out into the workplace for 40 hours or more each week. There, our most important task (even before our actual job descriptions) is to learn how to encounter His Presence in the midst of our work days. One very powerful piece of this is to learn how to hear and obey His voice.
In the early 1990s, I was working at a men’s retail clothing store at Lenox Square Mall in Atlanta, Georgia. Buckhead is Atlanta’s Beverly Hills, and Lenox is one of the historic shopping malls in the southeast of the US. Celebrities like Elton John, Janet Jackson, Magic Johnson and Snoop Doggy Dog walked through the mall alongside a mix of tourists, young people, and members of Atlanta’s old money families.They call Lenox, “The Show,” and some retail companies required salespeople and managers to work for years in smaller malls before they earned the chance to work there. When you did get to “The Show,” you had to work hard to stay there, outselling your competition every day to keep from being sent back down to “the minor leagues.”
When I was promoted to Lenox, I had not known Jesus very long. In just five years, God had completely transformed my life but I still felt very new at being a “Christian.” God had given me great mentors or pastors who had fought to help me grow as a disciple of Jesus. One leader, John Stanko, imprinted on me the importance of learning to hear God’s voice.
It is very difficult to find a single significant character in the Bible who didn’t hear God’s voice. Jesus made it clear that He only said what His Father said to say and that He only did what His Father said to do. “Man does not live by bread alone,” Jesus said, quoting Deuteronomy 8:4, “but by every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God.” (Matthew 4:4) John Stanko made it clear to me that it is impossible to build a personal relationship with anyone without being able to communicate with them. “A relationship can only grow,” he said, “if the depth of communication grows.” You have to learn to hear, and then you have to learn to listen.
As a young believer, it had never occurred to me that you would leave your faith at the door as you walked out of church on Sunday. If there were ever a place I needed Jesus to save me, help me, and guide me, it was at work! I needed Him to show me where to work, to help me learn my position, and then to guide me to succeed. I prayed constantly that God would help me find success in ways that would help my young family. I also prayed that God would cause my daily work to help me to grow toward His bigger purpose for my life. I was terrified that I would let go of His hand as I went out to earn money and then get lost in a dead end career that was disconnected from His calling for me.
From the stories in the bible to you and me, Jesus walks into every life, and invites us to follow Him. This invitation includes the calling to be close to Him and the call to follow Him on a journey filled with purpose and growth that contributes to His greater purposes. God’s ways and our journeys are often counterintuitive and require faith — seeming to head the exact opposite direction from where He has promised to take us — like Abraham sacrificing Isaac or Jesus’ pathway to victory including His death on the cross. What is undeniable is that He has promised to be with us always. We have to grow closer and closer to Him especially as we work. Doing so will require us to learn to hear and follow God’s voice in every moment of our work days.
Back to my retail story. I quickly found myself in an impossible situation: Our store sold expensive shoes like Doc Martens that cost more than $100— a good sale when you are trying to be the number one salesperson. However, the stockroom for shoes was in a basement, and taking on a customer wanting to buy shoes could take 30-45 minutes. While I was trying to make this solid $100 sale, my competition could very easily make $1,000 to $2,000 in other sales. As a result, salespeople began handing shoe sales to cashiers so the cashiers would have to do the legwork. My problem was that I was the sales manager and as a manager, I had the responsibility of making sure the store ran well. When the cashiers headed down to find shoe sizes, no one remained to ring up customers. Lines formed and people got angry, costing us customers and sales.
One day, a family approached me with a shoe, looking for help and as I began to try to avoid them, I heard the Lord speak to me. “Fight for every customer. Care for them and do the right thing, and I will care for you.” It was clearly the Lord, so I obeyed. I turned and helped the customer. Sure enough, I made the $100 sale, and my competitors jumped ahead by $1,500 yet at the end of the day, somehow, I beat them. The same situation occurred the next day with the same results: I obeyed what God said, and helped the shoe customer. Once more, I fell behind. Once more, I was on top at the end of the day. After many more days of this, I started to actually look for shoe customers because I felt like I had found a secret. Over the next year, I cannot say that I always won the day when I took care of customers shopping for shoes but I can say that I rose to the top and was promoted at an astronomical rate. The Lord honored me as I listened to Him in the midst of my workday.
This is the humble story of a low-level manager but cannot it be any less true that God is speaking to you and will guide you through your work regardless of how high you have risen? God is omniscient and omnipotent. He knows the end from the beginning. Imagine what can happen in your career as you follow Jesus into each moment of your work. Learning to hear and obey God’s voice in your work day will give you success in your daily work in ways that do not damage your family and that push you forward into His purposes for your life.
