A Blue Collar Gospel

Many Christians in America spend much of their week working. Working hard. Myself included. Work is good, but it is hard. It is hard mentally and physically. Our days are spent working and we go home at night and want to collapse. Just to get up the next day and do it again. Some work all day, just to go to another job and work all night. It’s consuming, it’s hard, it’s good. Many Christians are normal, blue collar people. In light of our tough work week, we get to church on Sundays and just want some easy help to get through the week.

So the common thought among many modern Christians is that the gospel and right theology is for pastors and theologians. Most people just want practical tips and helps for their everyday life. While this may sound right and good to some, it could not be farther from the truth. Practical tips and helps, when boiled down to what they are, do not actually accomplish the help we seek from them; thus becoming very impractical. While practical helps may temporarily help us become better family members, bosses, employees, friends, etc., practical helps separated from the gospel and right theology only serve to be the equivalent of putting a band-aid on a brain tumor. The problem then, is that the practical helps we seek, do not go deep enough. Five steps to manhood, or ten steps to loving your neighbor, do not solve the problems of our sinful heart, do not give us a purpose to our work, and do not do anything to improve our standing before God. Therefore we need something more practical than practical steps.

I attest that the gospel and right theology is practical, and is just the practicality that we need. The gospel is not just some abstract thing for debating or speculating. The gospel is blue collar.

Right theology is an exposition of the gospel. Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection is not simply our way to heaven, it is our way to life. The gospel mends together our broken hearts of sin, and fixes the underlying issues of everything we want practical help for. Still more, the gospel doesn’t simply fix our brokenness, but it helps us live as imperfect people. The gospel is for the blue collar person. Do not think that it is simply for pastors and theologians. The gospel is the working man’s theology. It is immensely practical for twelve hour work days.

Not only is the gospel practical, but also, the nature of the gospel itself is practical. In the gospel we see that God himself is blue collar. God himself came down to man. He went to work among men. He got his hands dirty. Jesus worked hard, long, taxing, hours – emotionally and physically. We see this in Jesus’ earthly ministry of proclaiming the gospel through his caring for the poor, sick, and needy sinners. Jesus’ work was exhausting. Jesus’ work was exhausting, and it was also monotonous, and mundane. Throughout the gospels we see dealing with the same type of people, wanting the same things from him, over and over again. Sound like your day job? Jesus is not foreign to our work. He understands, cares, and experienced it himself. Not only is this true in Jesus’ earthly ministry, but also in his redeeming work at the cross. Through Jesus’ work on the cross, God is proclaiming to us that as hard as we may work, we cannot work hard enough to save ourselves, to make things right with God, or to please him. Yet, instead of God firing us, as if we were employees who continually failed on the job, God himself, the boss, came down into the place of the working man, worked himself, not just completing what we couldn’t finish, but doing all of our work for us. On the cross, Jesus took the punishment of lazy workers who did nothing, and gives to us failures, the finished work of salvation, that He worked out for us.

There are many ways in which the practicality of the wonderful message of the gospel works itself out in our blue collar settings, and there is simply one I wish to comment on a bit further. That is the proclaiming of the gospel in blue collar settings. If you’re a Christian, then God has given you a new heart, with new desires for the things of God. So deep down, you want to bring God glory, and you want to live for him. Yet it seems we’re a bit confused on how that looks, or how we do that. We are pressured by many influences in evangelicalism to make things Christian, or we are pressured that nothing is Christian unless it is going on mission trips or leading bible studies. Young people, especially, face this dilemma.

But it is much simpler, and far more practical than we make it out to be. Want to spend your life for the glory of God? Then proclaim the gospel, in all it’s insanity, to your coworkers. Don’t fall into the trap of guilt-driven emotionalism that says you have to go on mission trips or lead bible studies to impact the kingdom. If you don’t want to waste your life, then get the gospel out of your mouth, right where you are. There is nothing more practical for the monotony of the work week than this. This kind of thinking will turn your blue collar job into kingdom advancing mission without ever stepping foot onto an airplane.

There is nothing more thrilling than proclaiming the gospel in the mundane work of everyday life. In turn, it makes the mundane quite un-mundane. God is a master a reversing things. For that is what the gospel is – a great reversal of sorts. Our sin, for Christ’s righteousness; our endless cycle of boring, for exhilarating purpose in life. But count the cost. You can’t be cool and proclaim the gospel at the same time. You will be rejected by some, or many. To be effective we must embrace the idiocy (to the world) of the gospel.

The gospel works. It came down and worked in our place, and it works for us. The gospel is blue collar, so to speak.