Today there are millions of people out of work and looking for jobs. For the Christian man, being out of work is a difficult season which presents unusual concerns, burdens, and considerations. This message is a timely call for full obedience to the Word of God and total trust in Him as our all-sufficient Provider.

Scott Brown addresses this difficult topic of unemployment with biblical clarity, helping you understand how to navigate the waters of a very difficult season and showing you, from the Word of God, how to walk in victory. 

The National Center for Family Integrated Churches is pleased to present the message What to do when you're out of work by Scott Brown I'd like to begin by reading the passage of Scripture, Matthew chapter 6 verse 25 to 34. Therefore, I say to you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, nor about your body what you will put on. Is not life more than food and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air, for they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not worth much more than they?

Which of you by worrying can add one cubit to his stature? So why do you worry about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow. They neither toil nor spin. And yet I say to you that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.

Now if God so clothes the grass of the field which today is and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you, O ye of little faith. Therefore do not worry saying, what shall we eat or what shall we drink or what shall we wear? For all these things the Gentiles seek, for your Heavenly Father knows that you need all these things, but seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness and all of these things shall be added unto you. Therefore, do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Sufficient for the day is its own trouble.

So this passage of Scripture has much to say about what you do when there's nothing to do and this session is really about navigating the waters of finding yourself without a job. So having nothing to do is absolutely one of the most challenging things that can happen in a man's life. Manhood is tested there. Womanhood is tested there. Often marriages are put right on the chopping block in times like this.

And when you lose your job, it either just knocks the stuffing out of you or it makes you strong. It does one of those two things. And so no one goes through a season like this without really serious challenges to grapple with. Your mind, your will, your emotions, your relationship, your marriage are all really vulnerable in times like that. And if you're out of work now or you have been at any time in your life, you know how absolutely true that is.

Your identity, your dreams, your routines, everything seems to be laid bare. And you're not sure about any of them anymore. And so it's a very, very personal time. I'll never forget, I think it was 23 years ago, wasn't I fired from a job 23 years ago, Deborah? I think it was about that long ago and it was actually one of the most glorious experiences of my life.

I was that guy walking into church on Sunday morning as I was pretty sure the only guy out of a thousand people that didn't have a job and there I was the man without a job And that season actually opened up opportunities I never dreamed of. In fact, let me wager this, the things that I've been doing in the last decade never would have happened if I hadn't gotten fired from that job. I am so thankful for that and I'll never forget standing with the man who fired me who was saying you know you just don't fit in here very well Scott and he was right and I looked at him and I said this is the best thing that's ever happened to me. And it was true. What came out of my mouth at that moment, it turned out to be true.

And let me just suggest, brothers, if you've been relieved of your duties, this is the best thing that's ever happened to you. If you don't believe that, I don't know how you can be thinking Christianly about it. So this season of life, it either trounces you or it transforms you into a man, the man that God wants you to be and that you were not before. So which will it be? Which will it be for you brothers if you're in that state now?

So what's it like to ride out the waves of unemployment? First of all, I'm just going to call them the rapids. This is the terror that passes all understanding. You've been blown out of the door, your income is gone, and you realize that you're no longer employed. And the temptations are like washing over you, temptations to anger and resentment and all those rotten people that brought this all about.

And the status quo is over, you've lost something, your reputation, your life, your income, and life has changed forever. And honestly everybody needs rapids in their life. There's no sanctification without rapids. And now God has given you some significant ones. And so what do you do?

First of all, I think you have to say Rapids are good. Rapids are good. They're good for man's soul. Men actually, I believe, they need fire on their tails to keep them on the sanctification process. They need a problem.

They need a threat. They need a difficulty. They need something in their lives to drive them to the foot of Jesus Christ, to cry out to him, so that they would be finding all of their strength coming from him rather than themselves. So first the rapids. Then there are the still waters.

I'm just gonna call this the time of denial, where maybe you've got a three-month severance or maybe a year or you've got enough resources, you've got it figured out if you really skinny down your lifestyle that you can survive for a year and you're thinking I'm gonna really take this time to retool and rethink and so you go out to lunch for three-hour lunches you're doing home projects you know you're getting your family worship you know back on track and actually you're doing anything everything but trying to find yourself working. That's what you're doing. You're in denial stage. Oh, I have three months. Oh, I've never had three months before.

That certainly must be enough time. It's not enough time. It's not enough time. A year is not enough time. And so you think you have enough time and so you waste your time doing that.

And men often during this period They lag at this point and because of their denial they squander the opportunity away. And so that's about when your wife starts getting nervous. What are you doing? She says. And it's not the most welcome question because you're kind of actually enjoying it a little bit, a little bit too much maybe, because now the fire is off of your rear end now and now you can kind of relax.

After all, you have three months, you've never had that before. These are the still waters. These are the times of deception and denial. Then there's the eddy. You're navigating these waters.

It was so nice for all of it. Now you feel like you're just going in circles and there's nothing to do. You've applied for 50 jobs. You've been on the internet for five days straight trying to find a job, applying, you know, everywhere you can. But now you've written three business plans already and decided these won't work.

Plus I'm scared to do them. And you know you've had a number of ideas for many years. You write them and they say, nope, I'm not going to do those. Your pride is dashed. You're useless.

You're just striving against the wind and you're swirling. Your life is just kind of swirling down a vortex and you begin to get angry Solomon wrote in Ecclesiastes about vanity and striving against the wind he said let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter fear God and keep his commandments for this is man's all For God will bring every work into judgment, including every secret thing, whether it is good or evil. This time of being in the eddy is a time of enormous temptation. And then you come to the dam. Everywhere you turn is a roadblock and nothing is working at all.

And you've tried a number of things and the frustration begins to build of the things that are hindering you and holding you back. In that time your only hope is what the psalmist said in Psalm 1 21. I will lift up my eyes to the hills from whence comes my help. My help comes from the Lord who made heaven and earth he will not allow your foot to be moved he who keeps you will not slumber behold he who keeps Israel shall neither slumber nor sleep the Lord is your keeper The Lord is your shade on your right hand. The sun shall not strike you by day nor the moon by night.

The Lord shall preserve you from all evil. He shall preserve your soul. The Lord shall preserve your going out and you're coming in from this time forth and even forevermore and so you're just in front of a dam and you can't go any farther And then you come into the backwater. And I'm just going to call this depression, where the interpretations of the situations have all been wrong. And it's led you into depression.

And now you find yourself in a sinful funk, a sinful, evil, unbelieving funk where the depression is rising against you. Most men who find themselves out of work for any length of time come to this place at some point. It might happen early, it might happen late in the cycle. And then you go to the waterfall. You hear something in the background, you hear this rumbling, and now Terror grips your heart because you're running out of money.

And you only have a few days of money left. And you're going to miss your rent payment. And now, because the market's been so bad, you're upside down on your mortgage. You can't sell your house. You're a dead man.

And now, you stand before your wife. And you don't even feel like a man because it's your responsibility to provide and you've done that but you can't do that now so now it's a time of waterfall and you see your whole financial world imploding and you hear the Falls overhead and you are gonna go over those falls because you are in a river that you can't get out of. But it's the river that God has you in. It's your river, and so you have to make the best of it. So this is sort of the journey that happens with men who have fallen out of employment and maybe if you're in any of those situations there are particular sins in every stage that men have to grapple with.

Now I want to give you seven admonitions. First of all, understand the moment. Understand the moment. We often misunderstand the purposes of all things. The purpose of all things are for the glory of God.

And all things happen under heaven in order to somehow demonstrate the goodness, the faithfulness, and the unmatchable glory of God. And everything happens, including your job loss, to prove God's greatness, the perfections of his name, his integrity, his love, his blessing. Yes, even your unemployment is a theater for the glory of God. And this is the end for which God created the world to glorify himself. And everything that happens under heaven is designed for His glory.

There is nothing that has happened in your life that was not designed by God to glorify Himself. And we are his creatures standing in the place to glorify him in the midst of all of our trials. Now, there are a number of things going on in the world that often we sort of lose touch with. God is sanctifying his bride. God is preparing his bride for heaven.

And often as he's preparing her for heaven, he takes earthly things away so that they'll desire heaven more. They've gotten a little too happy about things in this world. And God often takes from us so that He might reveal to us that He's giving us something far, far more. Remember the story of Moses? Moses so wanted to go into the Promised Land and he begged God to go into the Promised Land and finally God said, stop it, don't ask me again to go into the Promised Land.

And then God, in the very last day of Moses' life, he preaches to the children of Israel. And God commands him to go to Mount Pisgah to die. He says, Moses, go up there and die. And God reminds Moses, in the very last hours of his life, you will not go into the Promised Land because you sinned. And so Moses makes the hike to Mount Pisgah to go up and die.

And the Bible says that Moses looked out over the whole land and he could see it all. He could see Jericho and Dan. He could see the whole land before him. And the land that he so longed for was right there. And then God took him to the real promised land.

What he had longed for was so underweight for what God was going to give him. He wanted that land, but God had a greater land for him and that's true. That's true of the moment that every man finds himself in when he's unemployed. God is preparing a bride for heaven. God is also separating the sheep from the goats.

During a time like this, you may have been a religious person going to church, but you realize you actually have not had genuine faith in God. You were never really converted in the first place. You prayed a prayer, you went down an aisle, but your heart was never converted. You never really believed in God. You just trusted him every day of your life.

You were scamming and scheming. You had never repented of your sins with a deep repentance. You never trusted in him and him alone for salvation. You just were trying to be a better and better person, a better dad, a better worker, a better friend, a better church member. But you never ever really tasted the kindness of the Lord so that when you lost your job you didn't see it as a kindness you saw it as a curse but God is separating the sheep from the goats through the trials and tribulations in this life and it often reveals who you really are and so you have two alternatives to fall before the Lord Jesus Christ and say oh have mercy on me a sinner I've been such a nice moral person but my morality is worth nothing Oh save me I repent of my sin of disbelief or or you see the goodness of the Lord.

You have to understand the moment. Now one thing that is that we have to understand in this world is that when God is building his kingdom in us through us, His building plans don't conform to worldly standards of success. God is not as interested in our monetary success as we are. He has bigger fish to fry and so we often hope that God will define success that we have always defined it but he doesn't do that And so success in business is not summarized in the kingdom of heaven by the bottom line, but it's summarized by how God was glorified. And so sometimes losing a job can be the very best thing that ever happened to you because it shows your spiritual nature, it reveals your sin, it challenges you to forgive those who have wronged you, And so you have to understand the moment.

Our church this year, we're encouraging our families to read the letters of Samuel Rutherford. Every year, we recommend a book for family reading. This year, it's Samuel Rutherford's letters. Now, one of the things that is so apparent in the letters of Samuel Rutherford is that he was constantly engaged in the deepest suffering of the people in his church and he engaged his life in their sufferings so deeply I I'm just gonna call him the Apostle to the sufferers and as I've been reading his letters to people who've lost children or the death of a loved one or some terrible calamity or imprisonment or something that would happen. I've been writing down his understanding of suffering and somehow God gave this man a very precisely biblical understanding of suffering and I want to read you some of the things that he says to those who are suffering these are quotations out of the letters of Samuel Rutherford he says our trials would not hurt so much if our vision of heaven were clearer.

He says, he may grind you to powder, but he will put you back on his wheel. He says, what a debt we owe to the blows of the Lord. The Lord disciplines those whom he loves. He said this, contrasting God and the devil. The devil often sends his sons into feasting and reveling while the sons of God are sent to exile and prison.

He says no suffering is ever wasted. He says God will deprive us of whatever is idolized. He says, when we learn to say it is the Lord who has done this, he knows what you need and what you can endure. Rutherford says, he holds the cup of affliction to your mouth. Oh sweet is the yoke of Christ, the chains are of pure gold.

Now Rutherford believed that every trial was directly from the hand of the Lord Jesus Christ every time a child died he believed that it was Christ that killed that child for his own glory every husband who passed into eternity in an untimely way He believed it was Christ who snatched him off the earth for his own glory. I submit that to you this afternoon that this is true. That there's nothing that happens anywhere on the earth that God has not ordained it. You must understand the moment. You must understand that God owns every moment you must understand that not a hair falls to the ground but he doesn't know it you have to understand that everything is governed by God even the wind and the waves obey him so you must understand the moment Isaiah said it this way in Isaiah 59 verses 1 & 2 behold the Lord's hand is not shortened that it cannot save nor his ear heavy that it cannot hear but your iniquities have separated you from your God and your sins have hidden his face from you so that he will not hear You just have to understand that everything that happens under this great sky happens because God has ordained it.

So understand the moment. That's the first admonition. Understand the moment. Second admonition is play your role. Play your role.

If you're a father, you have to understand you have a son to equip to face suffering. You have a daughter to inspire. You have a wife to nourish and cherish. Don't forget who you are. You know this is not all about you.

It's an opportunity for the equipping of those whom God has placed in your hands. Self-absorption, self-pity, anger, resentment, all these things will destroy your role. So man, play your role. Play your role. That's why James says, count it all joy my brethren when you encounter various trials knowing that the testing of your faith produces patience.

But let patience have its perfect work. I'll say that again. Let patience have its perfect work that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing. When you lose your job, you have a responsibility that what you invest in your son makes him say, I have the strongest father anybody ever had. That your daughter says, my dad is a valiant warrior.

You can knock him down, but you can't wipe the smile off of his face. Your wife says, that man, that man inspires me. I'll follow him to the ends of the earth he's afraid of nothing you have a responsibility you have a role to play that's why Jesus said therefore I say to you Do not worry about your life or what you will eat or what you will drink or your body. Here's something we need to understand with real clarity. Worry is a really nice word for practical atheism.

It says you really don't believe. It says you don't really believe what God has said about himself and his world. It says that you don't believe that he who began a good work in you will perfect it until the day of Christ Jesus. It says that you believe the world is just some random place where whatever happens and you just sort of fight your way through it. Well that's not your father's world.

That might be your world, but that's not your father's world. It's practical atheism to be plunged into the role of self-pity and anger and resentment. So if you're swirling around in that eddy, you need to understand what that means. Job, Job played the role. Job played the man.

He lost everything. And from the pile of ashes that he was sitting on, he said, naked I came from my mother's womb, and naked shall I return there. The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away. Blessed be the name of the Lord. Job said that because he knew that his life was not his own and he knew that this world was not his home and he knew that his Redeemer lived and so he could say that.

And when his wife came to him and said curse God and die job let loose praises toward God we don't know what happened to Job's wife but I think she was taken up in his optimism and she was taken up in his faith which is what every man ought to do that's why God put you in the place that He has you in now. You would take up the mantle of Shepherd and see the Promised Land and keep heading toward it without flinching and without looking back. That's the second admonition, play your role. The third admonition is keep working. Keep working.

Jesus said, I am working as my Father in heaven is working. The Father and the Son were always working, so should you. That's really as simple as I could say. Never stop working. Never stop being a productive member of the community and of society.

You should make it your full-time job to either be working in something that's meaningful and productive or finding something that is meaningful and productive. And you should wear yourself out. If you normally get up at five o'clock in the morning don't stop don't sleep till eight or nine and hang around and piddle around the day get to work make it happen don't ever stop working God has given to men to work. This is what he has designed for us to do. And we fall apart when we don't work.

If you want to get depressed, then stop working. I believe God has designed work to keep us out of the doldrums of depression. You might think, oh, the pressures of my job are just so bad. But you know what they do? They drive you.

They drive you to God. They make you cry out to God. They give you something else to think about other than your pitiful old self. Now should you just go out and get any kind of job? Sort of.

Sort of. I'll just give you my view of this. Some people say, just do any kind of job you possibly can do. And so here's what happens to some people. They've had a corporate job all their lives and now after trying to get a job for three months they say okay I'm just going to go to McDonald's I'm going to go to Home Depot and So they go and apply to 50 more places that they would never really ever wanna work.

And what happens is these HR managers, they understand what's going on. They understand that you do not love this job and you won't be here and they won't hire you and you're gonna go from one city to the next and apply at every Home Depot in America and not one of them will hire you even though you have an MBA because they know you won't be around if you get a job. They're stupid to hire you because that's not what you know how to do. That's not you. And so often men waste enormous amounts of time going after things that they don't really want to do and they don't know how to do.

Well, at the same time, I've seen men say, I'm going to find some kind of a job where I can at least have some cash flow in while I continue to pound on what I can do. But understand, your employer may understand that as well. My counsel to men is don't go into this cycle of applying to jobs that you don't want and the HR manager knows that you're not going to keep because the only result of that is you're gonna say I'm a bigger loser than I thought I was I can't even get a job at McDonald's so don't go there but keep working keep working Work at the things that you know how to do and continue to meet people who do the things that you know how to do. Maybe there's a place that you could work. Go work for them for free.

Go ply your trade and say, hey, I'll work for you for free for a while. I have got to work. But don't stop working. Or this perhaps is also the time where the core from corporate America has been severed. Take advantage of it.

This is the greatest opportunity of your life. Now you have to do it. Go do it. Go start that company with lots of counsel. Seek wise counselors.

Talk to people who actually do it for a living. Spend time interviewing people who've been through the school of hard knocks and ask them questions and deal with it. My speech tomorrow is about the seven great mistakes that family businesses make, that entrepreneurial businesses make. So, I'll talk about that tomorrow. There's really a lot to consider if you're going to start a business and move ahead in something you've never done before.

Talk to entrepreneurs. Talk to men who have both who failed and succeeded and failed and succeeded because that's pretty much what it's like if you're an entrepreneur. And we had a guy in our church recently that lost his job. He'd been a project manager his whole life and he was out of work and so he kept doing the stuff that he was doing. He volunteered at his trade association to put on a big trade show.

In our church he figured out how to get people together to help people with functional needs and moving and things like that that were going on with people in our church. He was a project manager. He set up processes to manage some projects in our church. He kept on working. He was productively engaged.

When I was asking Kevin Swanson about what he wanted this session to kind of be all about, he said Scott somehow say this, he said when the pilgrims came to America There were no jobs but there was a lot of work to do and that's what they did. They worked. So there you have it. Keep working. Keep working.

Don't ever stop working and treat this time of unemployment as a time of employment. Number four, focus on what God has given you. I mean think about the resources that are in your hands. Most people have more resource than they're ever really aware of. You know we often underestimate the gifts that God has already given us and so we go blind to them.

Maybe you live in a house. How could your house be utilized to increase cash flow? Do You have an internet connection? Is it possible that that internet connection could somehow be served to increase your income or start a business? You have a family.

You live in a community. Maybe there are people out there that you need to go talk to. You have friends. You live in a community and there just so happens to be a guy who has a business who's doing exactly what you've always wanted to do. Why don't you just go meet him?

It's a resource God put you in the midst of a rich community with enormous resources. They're all around you. And they're people that you know that know other people, that know other people, and go and meet with them. You have more resources than you even think you do. And plus, there's the Spirit of God who activates resources in ways that nobody ever could.

And he arranges things that can't be arranged by human mechanisms. So Focus on what God has given you. Number five, understand the role of the church. How is the church supposed to help? I want to give some basic principles and practices that churches should consider when dealing with people who are out of work.

And the first I've spent significant amount of time on. Men must work. The Bible says if a man doesn't work, don't let him eat. So that's the church's position on that. Churches should have a particular disposition toward men that don't work.

And it means that then don't let them eat if they don't work. Number two, I'm going to give you six things that churches should consider. The second is family resources should be applied first before the church is ever engaged. In other words, family resources should be tapped out before the church is engaged. Number three, nobody will be supported by means of church-provided financial security with any kind of permanency unless it's a widow that falls into the biblical qualifications.

Number four, it's not the intent of the church to supplement or salvage somebody's 401k or their IRA or fifth on their mortgage or to save their business or to pay off debts that families have worked themselves into over time. That's not the church's role. Sixth, if the money is given then the deacons of that church should be careful to administer spiritual and financial accountability for those funds. So you have to understand what the church ought to do and the church ought not to do. The church ought to be there as prayer warriors, as counselors, as business consultants, as whatever is there in that resource in that church.

Number six. Don't waste your chastisement. Now it's actually, to use the word chastisement and the loss of your job might seem kind of over the top or it might seem inappropriate and it may be for you but we live in kind of environment where no one wants to blame the earthquake on God's judgment. That's sort of the world we live in. Nobody wants to blame my calamity on my sin, particularly me.

I'm the last guy to blame my trials on my own sins because I have a much higher view of myself. It certainly couldn't be that. It has to be some grander purpose that God has in mind, but no, I often deceive myself and I think that somehow it wasn't chastisement when actually there was chastisement in it. So let's face the reality of chastisement and recognize that this is a category of the ministry of God in our lives. That he disciplines those whom he loves.

But we often so overestimate our righteousness that we feel that we deserved better treatment, and then it all happened because of the evil in all of those people out there. The politics, the motivations, the meanness, so we misunderstand and we misspeak to ourselves and we miss the value of considering the chastisement of the Lord in these kinds of situations so we should always ask what sins does this situation expose what bad patterns are there that I can repent of don't waste your chastisement you know you're a son when God chastises you Hebrews 12 5 says Have you forgotten the exhortation which speaks to you as sons? My son do not despise the chastening of the Lord, nor be discouraged when you are rebuked by him. For whom the Lord loves, he chastens and scourges every son whom he receives so the chastisement comes from a loving God and the seventh seventh admonition don't live in the past You can waste enormous amounts of mental energy and conversation with people about what you should have done, what you could have done, how you didn't deserve to lose that job, how you really have the right to go after them with a lawsuit because they fired you wrongly.

And so instead of spending your energy moving forward, you're lost in a world of coulda, shoulda, woulda, and it's a crummy world to live in because that's not your world. The world that God delivered to you is a different world than the one that's back there. So you need to move forward and continue with the biblical work ethic and continue with the duties that God has called men to do. Going out, being busy about the kingdom of God while you're going out and understand that though this was a wake-up call you must move forward and don't obsess about those times. I said in the last point Consider it chastisement if it was and what you might learn.

At the same time, at the same time, you press on to the upward call of God. You've got to keep moving and that's what godly men do. You know, a man may fall down but the righteous men get up again and they inspire that son and they inspire that daughter and that wife to keep on moving and then the last point I wanted to deal with here is this. It's really one reality, one reality. There is a reality that's so important to acknowledge in all of our trials.

And you cannot understand how to move through a trial unless you understand what I'm going to tell you in just a second. All men and women stand before what the Bible calls the great cloud of witnesses and they're either demonstrating the power of God or the wisdom of man at any given time. This is the theater of the glory of God here. And so what I want to leave you with today is this one reality. This is your finest hour.

This is your finest hour. You may think it's the hardest thing you've ever faced, but it is your finest hour. And it's the time, it's what you will look back on either with joy or with grief. Did you have self-confidence or do you have no confidence or did you have God confidence? And did you take your opportunity to play your role to equip your son and inspire your daughter and nourish your wife this is your finest hour it was that way with job on the pile of ashes it was that way with Joseph in the prison it was that way with Daniel in the fiery furnace It was that way with John the Baptist in prison.

And it was that way with the Lord Jesus Christ in the grave. You were made for this situation. Heaven created this situation perfectly for you. It's as distinctly customized for your life as anything that's ever happened to you. And it is your finest hour.

And it is God's love toward you. And it is the instruction of God for those around you and it happened to you because you are a son and you're not an orphan praise God that it has happened And now let's move forward with all of our hearts, with the glory of God as our goal. Would you pray with me? Oh Lord, we thank you that you have created such a world in which you are sovereign, in which you are the ruler of the kings of the earth that you are in control of every synapse of every brain in the world and that nothing can stay your hand and no one can say to you what have you done amen one more thing here's what really helps okay it really helps this is to you young men okay right this is to young men It really helps to marry a woman who understands the sovereignty of God. Do you understand that?

It really helps. I can't tell you how many times my dear wife has rescued me out of the eddy because of her understanding. Her father and mother taught her the doctrine of the sovereignty of God when she was a little girl and I'm so glad that they did and so find a woman who understands the sovereignty of God. You wives, do you understand how important you are? Do you get the strategic importance of your role in the world, in the glory of God?

The National Center for Family Integrated Churches is dedicated to proclaiming the sufficiency of scripture for church and family life and to the establishment of biblically ordered churches. For more information, resources, and products, please visit our website at www.ncfic.org. You