“So, my dear brothers and sisters, be strong and immovable. Always work enthusiastically for the Lord, for you know that nothing you do for the Lord is ever useless.”

Not everywhere is the battle between Uber and Lyft (two ride-sharing companies) so public as it is here in the Bay Area. These two “Unicorns” are jousting daily and thrusting their horns at each other in the public arena.  In the past month the premise of the besting has tilted up as Uber defends a number of actions that question the culture and ethics of the company.  Lyft has pounced on this and started advertising how they are a better corporate citizen having launched their “Round-Up” the dollar amounts of rides and give that money to charitable causes.  Would they have done this, now, if not for the opening that Uber has given them to highlight that Uber’s ethics aren’t as good?  Probably not, but still they have and it is a reminder to all of us that once the smoke clears and we can clearly see who a company is and what they stand for, that our determination many times will come back down to the ethics by which the company operates, or not.

In the verse that Paul gives the Church at Corinth about the value of their work, to understand it fully we have to read an earlier verse where Paul tells them; “Just as we are now like the earthly man, we will someday be likethe heavenly man.”  Other versions of the Bible say, “we shall also bear the image of the man of heaven”,  and “let us be like the heavenly man”.  What he is doing is giving us a time context to understand.  He is saying that what we do today in our earthly lives is a time of transition and that we are being prepared, and we are preparing, for the time when we will sit within His Kingdom.  What this tells me is that all of our behaviors and the implications of our ethics do matter and as the writer Fleming Rutledge says, “The deeds of Christians in the present time – however insignificant the may seem, however ‘vain’ they may appear to those who value worldly success – are already being built into God’s advancing kingdom”.  What a great word for any of us who might wonder today why we should strive so hard to work within God’s ethics.

Reference:  1 Corinthians 15:58 (New Living Translation)