Don't Go Down

So I sent messengers to them, saying, "I am doing a great work and cannot come down. Why should the work cease while I leave it and go down to you?" - Nehemiah 6:3

Where do you work?

I have served the Lord in many different ways over my life (pastor, teacher, missionary, researcher, organizational leader). Often I was engaged in writing, researching, and communicating the global need to reach the unreached with the good news of Jesus Christ, while also deep in Bible study for the next sermon or class.  Nehemiah's days in Jerusalem were spent providing oversight to the reconstruction of the wall that surrounded the city; a city literally set on a hill. You might say that he was engaged in "an elevated work in a high place."

I don't know how "high up" you are when you labor (position or place), but for those of us who follow Christ, everything we do is "elevated" and each day we face multiple opportunities to step "down" or away from God's best. Honoring God with our vocation (even when that vocation is not directly aimed at church advance) is great work and when we leave it, when we go down to mix-it-up with worldly notions and ideas that run counter to God's best, it is always a distraction and mistake.

No matter what you do, if you do it for Him it is great work.  Don't go down.

Thank God every morning when you get up that you have something to do which must be done, whether you like it or not.  Being forced to work, and forced to do your best, will breed in you temperance, self-control, diligence, strength of will, content, and a hundred other virtues which the idle never know. - Charles Kingsley