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The heart is what you are, in the secrecy of your thought and feeling, which nobody knows but God. And what you are at the invisible root matters as much to God as what you are at the visible branch.
Man looks on the outward appearance, but Yahweh looks on the heart
(1 Samuel 16:7)
From the heart are all the issues of life and the demonstration of our faith at work.
- What comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart . . . For out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, fornication, theft, false witness, slander. These are what defile a man” (Matthew 15:18–19).
- “Either make the tree good, and its fruit good; or make the tree bad, and its fruit bad; for the tree is known by its fruit . . . For out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks” (Matthew 12:33–34).
So, the heart is utterly crucial to Jesus. What we are in the deep, private recesses of our lives is what he cares about most. Our colleagues are paying attention to what we say.
Jesus did not come into the world simply because we have some bad habits that need to be broken. He came into the world because we have such dirty hearts that need to be purified. That is leadership to focus on that.
The corporate relevance of Jesus’s teaching on purity of heart is because that is what the teaching is about. In fact, this teaching is emphatically irrelevant if measured by contemporary social standards. Blessed are the pure in heart, Jesus says, not for they shall save the legislature millions of dollars in AFDC payments. Rather, blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.
The impact implicit in Jesus’s teaching is so that our consciences can gladly affirm the centrality of God in this radical teaching about leadership. My own conviction is that the fundamental problem in workplaces and culture is that we attempt to solve human problems while neglecting the centrality of God in the life of the soul.
We are so bombarded by human tragedies of poverty and crime and abuse and neglect and war and the manifold injustices of man to man, that we are tempted to agree with the world that it is useless pie in the sky by and by to be concerned with whether the soul will ever see God.
But this is the greatest of all tragedies — that in seeking to relieve the temporal miseries of man we set aside the centrality of God. But Jesus comes to us this morning and says, “Blessed are the pure in heart,” not first because they change society, but first because they will see God.
Seeing God is the great goal of being pure. Abandon that goal and human work and culture collapses into ruin.
Leaders know this.
Digital Business
I make every attempt not to compartmentalize my life. I strive to be the same at work or at home or at church or wherever I am. I am not always successful doing so and I often feel pulled to be who and what my job defines of me (even outside of work) more so than what God defines me to be. I pray for perseverance in adhering to the Word and the will of the Father’s role in my life.
Thanks Tim. This is a tough one for me and I think a lot of Christians. Many companies are very antagonistic to the Way of Jesus.
I guess I’ve been fortunate that I’ve gotten no backlash. But there is a certain “what have you done lately” and an all-consuming 24/7 mentality. And if I’m different at work than I am everywhere else, that would be stifling. And, tbh, sometimes I allow it to stifle.