Colossians 3:22-4:122Slaves, obey in everything those who are your earthly masters, not by way of eye-service, as people-pleasers, but with sincerity of heart, fearing the Lord. 23 Whatever you do, work heartily, as for the Lord and not for men, 24knowing that from the Lord you will receive the inheritance as your reward. You are serving the Lord Christ. 25For the wrongdoer will be paid back for the wrong he has done, and there is no partiality.
1Masters, treat your slaves justly and fairly, knowing that you also have a Master in heaven.
Jesus is not peripheral to our life at work, He is or should be central to it. He should influence our attitude towards our employers and/or employees and to the job itself. Slaves are told to obey everything they are told to do and work hard, irrespective of the quality of character of their boss. This is because they are ultimately working for Jesus and we should aim to work hard, to the best of our ability for Him. People-pleasers perform “eye-service”, they are seen to do the right thing, or make everybody aware of what they have done. Jesus sees everything we do, we don’t need to brag about things we have done and we can’t cover up short cuts that we might have taken. We aren’t doing it to receive compliments and the hard work may well go unnoticed by your boss, but that doesn’t matter because we are serving Jesus.
If you are in charge of other people you need to lead like Jesus, not slacking off yourself or treating your employees badly, modelling your leadership on Jesus. Again, Jesus is our role models for all our attitudes at work with the employer or employee. Having this attitude at work is highly counter-cultural and wont happen by accident, we need to take deliberate steps to follow Him in the workplace.