Alongside the hope in the Jesus Manifesto (Matthew 5-7) which this mood of protest and quest inspires in Christians, there is also (or should be) a sense of shame. For if today’s young people are looking for the right things (meaning, peace, love, reality), they are looking for them in the wrong places. Our leaders at work have failed us. It is clear. We must commit to showing the love of Jesus in a different way at work.

• The first place to which they should be able to turn is the one place which they normally ignore, namely the church.
• For too often what they see in the church is not counter-culture but conformism, not a new society which embodies their ideals but another version of the old society which they have renounced, not life but death.
• They would readily endorse today what Jesus said of a church in the first century: ‘You have the name of being alive, and you are dead.’

It is urgent that we not only see but feel the greatness of this tragedy at work. For insofar as the church is conformed to the world, and the two communities appear to the onlooker to be merely two versions of the same thing, the church is contradicting its identity. No comment could be more hurtful to the Christian than the words, ‘But you are no different from anybody else.’

The essential theme of the whole Bible from beginning to end is that God’s historical purpose is to call out a people for himself; that this people is a ‘holy’ people, set apart from the world to belong to him and to obey him; and that its vocation is to be true to its identity, that is, to be ‘holy’ or ‘different’ in all its outlook and behavior. This means we must show our faith at work. We must be willing to stand up for the way of Jesus and the way of love.

This is how God put it to the people of Israel soon after he had rescued them from their Egyptian slavery [and work] and made them his special people by covenant: ‘I am the Lord your God. You shall not do as they do in the land of Egypt, where you dwelt, and you shall not do as they do in the land of Canaan, to which I am bringing you. You shall not walk in their statutes. You shall do my ordinances and keep my statutes and walk in them. I am the Lord your God.’

• This appeal of God to his people while they work, it will be noted, began, and ended with the statement that he was the Lord their God.
• It was because he was their covenant God, and because they were his special people, that they were to be different from everybody else as we work out our faith at work.
• They were to follow his commandments and not take their lead from the standards of those around them at work.