By the late 1800s, Americans were using an unusual expression to describe their work. People began calling their jobs their “meal tickets.”
“My arm is my meal ticket,” the construction worker would brag. “My voice is my meal ticket,” the singer could claim. “My smooth talk is my meal ticket,” the politician could boast.
A “meal ticket” is an interesting way to describe your job, because it means you’re not really doing your job because it’s your job. You’re doing it to put food on the table, to put money in your bank account, and to create the ability to live comfortably—to enjoy your weekend and someday make it to retirement. Your job is a means to an end. It’s something you do so you can eventually do what you really want to do.
But that kind of living is exhausting.
This past weekend at Zion, we continued a series called Future Proof, based on the book of 1 Thessalonians, which talks a lot about the future.
The future can be stressful. We can be uncertain about it financially as we watch the bond market go crazy. We can be fearful of it politically as the midterm elections have shaken things up significantly. And we can even tie ourselves up in knots over it personally as we worry about which college we’re going to get into or whether we have enough money in our IRA.
The book of 1 Thessalonians carries a simple but profoundly challenging message: we don’t need to worry about the future because our future has been secured in Christ. His forgiveness, His life, and His salvation are all we need to walk into the future confidently and peacefully.
And this is the challenge of making our work our meal ticket. As I talked about in my message this past weekend, when we do our jobs as a means to eventually do the things we really want to do, most of those things get saved for a mysterious and mystical date on our calendar called “When things slow down…”
But things have a funny way never slowing down. So we find ourselves stuck in a job we don’t like, working at an unsustainable pace we can’t endure, dreaming of a leisurely future that never arrives.
In 1 Thessalonians, the apostle Paul invites us to reimagine our relationship with our jobs when he writes:
Make it your ambition to lead a quiet life: You should mind your own business and work with your hands, just as we told you, so that your daily life may win the respect of outsiders. (1 Thessalonians 4:11–12)
Paul says you can work and lead a quiet, sustainably paced life at the same time. But you may have to change the way you think about why you work. You can no longer just grind it out on the jobsite or at the office as you tediously trudge toward your weekend or some far-off future retirement. Instead, how you work, right now, should “win the respect of outsiders.” In other words, it should be a witness to the world of Jesus and an act of love toward others.
The English novelist and playwright Dorothy Sayers once wrote:
The modern tendency seems to be to identify work with gainful employment … The fallacy being that work is not the expression of man’s creative energy in the service of society, but only something he does in order to obtain money and leisure.
Sayers knew that to be sustainable, your work has to be meaningful. It has to make a difference in society and in people’s lives.
Jesus is the ultimate model of that kind of work. The preacher of Hebrews says that Jesus barreled toward the cross because, in Jesus’ greatest moment of anguish, He knew that He would also discover His deepest reason for joy:
For the joy set before Him He endured the cross, scorning its shame. (Hebrews 12:2)
And what is that joy set before Him? You. You kept Jesus going. He worked out of His love for you, not to earn a weekend or a retirement, but to give everything He has—even His life—for you.
You’ve probably heard the old canard: “Do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life.” I’m not sure that’s true. But here’s how I think Paul would put it: “Work for the sake of love, and your work won’t be a way to bide your time ‘until things slow down…’”
Don’t work for the weekend or retirement. Work for others. It may make this Monday feel a lot more meaningful.