From Useless to Beloved

Pastor Josh almost didn't make it to the stage this Sunday. Two weeks ago his small intestine blocked on a plane in the Gold Coast, the same illness he has lived with since he was twenty-six. He stood up to preach still unwell, speech slow, strength low. And what he brought was the most fitting possible close to the Celebrating Work series: a sermon not about doing more, but about what the gospel does to a person who suddenly can't do anything at all.

The text was Philemon, Paul's shortest letter, written not to a church but to one man. It's an odd place to land a series on work, until you see what Pastor Josh saw in it. Over the past weeks the series had built a whole theology. God made us to create and contribute. Work in its redeemed form is a blessing and a divine calling. We work for a true boss in heaven, not just our earthly one, and we work from Sabbath rest rather than from restlessness. Philemon is where all of that gets tested on a single human life.

Before any of it, though, Pastor Josh named the problem he sees most as a pastor: we compartmentalise. We become a different person at church than we are at work, at home, with our friends. We quietly file life into sacred and secular and operate by different rules in each.

We are not called to just know the gospel, but we are called to live out the gospel in your family, in your work, in your relationship, in your leisure, in your recreation, in your business. Every aspect of your life, the gospel should be in there.

That's the question driving the whole sermon. When Jesus died and rose, what does that actually change about Monday? Philemon gives three answers.

From useless to useful

Here's the backstory. Philemon was a wealthy Christian in Colossae. He owned a slave named Onesimus, a name that literally means useful. But Onesimus stole money and ran away, which in the Roman world could get a runaway slave executed. He fled to Rome, somehow crossed paths with the imprisoned Paul, heard the gospel, and became a Christian. Then Paul did something startling. He sent Onesimus back to his owner, carrying this very letter.

And in the letter Paul flips the man's whole identity. Formerly he was useless to you, but now he is indeed useful. Useful, Pastor Josh pressed, doesn't mean productive. It means valuable, beloved, someone who matters.

Useful not in a sense that utilitarian, like you need to be able to produce something. No, you are valuable. You are valuable because the gospel has come. What is more valuable than Jesus' death on the cross, and He did it for you?

Watch what Paul says about himself in the same breath: I, Paul, an old man and now a prisoner. Old. Locked up. Unable to do anything. By the world's accounting, useless. Yet he writes with total confidence and authority. His value clearly isn't coming from his output.

This is where Pastor Josh got honest. There was a season, he admitted, when he thought he might need to step aside, that the church was getting younger while he was getting older. He's 57. And just before he got sick, he'd talked himself out of taking his upcoming Sabbath altogether.

You know, I'm the best preacher in this church. And I know Jason Lim preached well, but I'm better than him. Just kidding, right? All these people, that's a sense of that, that this God needs me.

Then he got sick. And in the hospital bed the first thing that hit him was: I'm old, I'm sick, I'm useless. Out of that came the line that anchored the whole point.

I've seen God work through my activity, but now I have to watch God work through my rest.

The danger, he said, is identifying yourself as someone who performs before God. We let our job title, our salary, our house, our possessions, our achievements tell us who we are. The gospel refuses to play that game. You were already valued at the cross, before you produced a single thing.

When a slave becomes a brother

The second change is relational, and Pastor Josh nearly couldn't get through it. Read what Paul asks of Philemon:

No longer as a bondservant but more than a bondservant, as a beloved brother, especially to me. But how much more to you, both in the flesh and in the Lord.

In the ancient world a slave was property, not a person. Telling a master to receive his runaway slave as a brother was unheard of. But that is exactly what the gospel does to relationships. Pastor Josh tied it straight to Heartbeat's vision statement: we exist to live out the gospel together wholeheartedly.

He confessed he's run church too long like an organisation, missing the divine plan in the person sitting in the next seat. The call is to love the person beside you because of what Jesus did for them, not because of what they offer you.

Truly loving the person because of what Jesus has done, not because of the person.

He got emotional reflecting on what it cost to build a church that is run by and for the second generation. He watched the room that morning, one group praying, another laughing over coffee, two sisters in different camps. And his plea was simple:

Can you treat each other like brother and sister, because they are God sent to your life? You have no idea what it took me to build a church like this.

Don't come and just be a religious Christian who sings a few songs, he warned. Come and actually love the person next to you, because Jesus died for them.

No longer a slave of circumstance

The third change is the one that pressed hardest this week. The gospel, Pastor Josh said, frees us from being a slave of circumstance and makes us a partner in God's divine plan. All three people in this letter were in hard situations, Paul in prison, Onesimus in danger, Philemon out of pocket, and the gospel let them read those circumstances through completely different glasses.

Most of us, he noted, run our lives on three motives: convenience, profit and preference. None of them are wrong on their own, but none of them can be your foundation. So instead of asking what's easiest or most beneficial, ask: what is the gospel in this circumstance?

Then he laid the indictment out plainly. How many of us dread Monday? Resent the family we were born into? Treat ourselves as victims of our lot?

You constantly put yourself as a victim of circumstance, slave of circumstance. That's not how you should view your life anymore.

He reached for John Piper's challenge, "Don't waste your cancer," and then for a story from the previous Sunday. Preaching at a Church of Christ in Barraba while away, he unexpectedly met Laura Story, who wrote "Indescribable." He hadn't known her story: married two years when her husband was diagnosed with a brain tumour, leaving him disabled. Out of that came her song "Blessing."

What if your blessing comes through raindrops? What if your healing comes through tears? What if a thousand sleepless nights are what it takes to know You are near? What if trials of this life are Your mercies in disguise?

Pastor Josh said the same of his own body. His coronary illness, he insisted, has made him a better pastor. It isn't a curse. It's how God teaches him, uses him and reaches the people who hear him. My sickness should become your blessing, the same way Paul's prison and Onesimus' slavery became blessings.

And then the moment from that very morning. Defeated, weak, no strength to preach, he was waiting for the elevator when a blind elderly woman in his building stepped out beaming, cheerfully asked for directions, said "have a good day" and walked off. He stood there as he felt the Holy Spirit cut through his self-pity:

What's wrong with you, Josh? I know you are sick. I know you are fearful. I died for you. Do you think all these circumstances you've gone through, that I don't have the power to make something beautiful out of it?

Carry it into Monday

That's where the series landed, on a single sentence Pastor Josh put on the screen:

Work is God's way of inviting us to partner in touching this world.

So don't go to work tomorrow complaining, resentful or negative. If you catch yourself there, he joked, come to his place and he'll introduce you to that blind lady. The point underneath the humour is serious. It's all about perspective, and the gospel has already changed you.

We're not called to be Christians only on Sunday, happy and clappy for an hour and then back to compartmentalised living. Joy follows us. The favour of God follows us. The One who died on the cross has already told you that you are worth it, that you have a mission, that you are called. So now you live, no matter what you carry, blind or sighted, broke or comfortable, alone or together, a life worthy of His calling.

Live out the gospel, together, wholeheartedly.