Fruit of the Spirit @ Work - Love

Pretty much every Christian will agree that God wants us to love everybody, even our enemies. But most of us kind of cross our fingers behind our backs, knowing that some people are simply unlovable. The workplace is a great place to find them! Think of your difficult customers, your competitors, those colleagues or employees you’d rather not spend time with, or your over-weaning boss! The trouble is, “love one another” and “love your enemies” aren’t optional. Not only that, but the kind of love Jesus talks about is way beyond anything we’re used to receiving or giving (read 1 Corinthians 13:5-8 if you doubt that!)

This post is the beginning of a series on the fruit of the Spirit in the workplace. Ephesians 5:22-23: But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, 23gentleness and self-control. Many of us are familiar with the list, may even have memorized it, and treat it as a nice theoretical ideal. When it comes to living this way in the workplace, though, it seems quite impractical. I plan to explore each of the nine attributes of the Spirit’s fruit from a workplace perspective.

Here’s the bottom line: this is impossible. For us. But not the Spirit. This isn’t what we’re supposed to drum up in ideal occasions, but how the Spirit wants to overflow through us in the workplace.

Love is the overriding element, of course – in fact we could say that love is the summary and the rest of the list is the detail. At some point I’ll explore 1 Corinthians 13:5-8 and each of the elements of Christian love (the Greek agape) as they relate to the workplace. But for now, suffice to say that the Kingdom of God will be most evident in the workplace when we see every individual, no matter how “nice” they are, the way God sees them. Every customer, colleague, supplier, employee and boss is a person created uniquely by God, in His image, loved by Him unconditionally, and of enormous value.

How do we see people that way? I’ve struggled with this just as much as you have. The only solution I’ve come across is prayer. It has become essential to me to pray regularly for everyone I come into regular contact with, to pray when people upset or annoy me, to pray for the needs of the most difficult people I meet with. In my prayer, I am getting to see them a little through God’s eyes, and inevitably love starts to grow. Without the Holy Spirit in me, though, I simply can’t do this. Love is the fruit of the Spirit – my prayer is that God will unlock this love and let it flow through me daily to those I work with.

On a practical level, this is a love that puts others before me, that considers their extraordinary value as people even when I’m dissatisfied with their work, and that listens to their challenges and joys with empathy and prayer. There’s more to come on this, but even this will make a surprising amount of difference in working relationships, in the atmosphere of a workplace, and in our perspective on work.