I (Jordan) don’t think I’ve ever heard of a more Jesus-like person than Fred Rogers. He was as one biographer put it, “Mother Teresa in a cardigan.”73 But if Rogers were here today, I’m confident he would remind us of two things. First, Jesus—not Fred—is the hero of this story. Second, the same Holy Spirit that empowered Rogers’s extraordinary life now lives in you and me. So, we modern mere Christians can glorify God through our work in much the same way as Rogers did. How?
1. Mere Christians glorify God by embracing their position in God’s “royal priesthood.” Before Christ, priests and Pharisees had a lock on which vocations did “the work of the Lord.” But when Jesus, the Great High Priest, came to earth, he spent the vast majority of his life working not as a religious professional but as a mere carpenter.
That truth helps us understand what the apostle Peter said in 1 Peter 2:9 when he claimed that every follower of Christ is now a member of God’s “royal priesthood.” It’s no longer just literal priests who represent God in the world and serve as conduits for his goodness. It’s every carpenter, entrepreneur, and barista—any Christian doing genuinely good work.
How can that be true? Because God is now in each and every Christian through the power of his Holy Spirit. So, to quote the great preacher Charles Spurgeon, for the believer, “nothing is secular—everything is sacred,” including your work as a mere Christian.74
Nobody embraced their position in God’s royal priesthood more enthusiastically than Fred Rogers, who believed he could do God’s work from behind a pulpit or a puppet—a conviction he literally took to his grave in the form of his “clergy tie.”
But Fred wasn’t just encouraged by the sacred label of his seemingly “secular” work. He glorified God by allowing that truth to shape his vocation. He worked hard at the “good works, which God prepared in advance” for him to do (Ephesians 2:10), even though, given his family’s considerable wealth, he never had to work a day in his life. He used his platform to tell artistic parables of the kingdom of God. And he worked to be a priestly “repairer of creation,” redeeming what he saw was broken in the medium of television.
Fred said that “deep within each of us is a spark of the divine just waiting to be used to light up a dark place.”75 That is true of you, believer. Like Fred Rogers, you can glorify God in the “dark place” you work by embracing your position in the “royal priesthood” and viewing your job as a primary place God has called you to “let your light shine before others” (Matthew 5:16).
Take a moment right now to thank God for drafting you into the “royal priesthood,” and ask him to show you how specifically he is calling you to more faithfully represent him in your workplace.
2. Mere Christians glorify God by making time to experience their belovedness. Fred Rogers lived a wildly productive life. Over the course of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood’s thirty-one seasons, Fred personally wrote nine hundred scripts, two hundred songs, and thirteen operas. Even more impressive was how much time he spent personally showing compassion to thousands of hurting people off camera.
But here’s what’s most remarkable about Fred’s productivity: He accomplished more than most people ever dream while also spending more time with his heavenly Father than most people ever dare.
He began each morning in silent prayer. At lunch, he would slip away to the quiet of his office to meditate. Upon arriving home from the studio, he would often spend another hour napping or praying before dinner.
As one of his friends put it, Fred “fiercely guarded his time of quiet and reflection.”76 And in this, he reflected his Savior who “often withdrew to lonely places and prayed” (Luke 5:16).
Like Jesus, Fred wasn’t interested in silence for the sake of silence. “It wasn’t just the absence of noise he advocated,” said a close friend of Fred’s, “but silence that reflects on the goodness of God.”77
In other words, the spiritual discipline of solitude was a means to an end for Fred Rogers: regularly experiencing the extraordinary love God had for him. A sign in Fred’s office explicitly reminded him of that love. It was a Hebrew printing of Song of Songs 2:16: “My beloved is mine and I am his.”
It is precisely because Fred spent so much time quietly reflecting on his status as a “beloved” child of God that he was able to share love so freely with God’s other children. “He didn’t need anything from you or from me,” reflected one of his coworkers.78 Because his sense of belovedness led him to “the freedom of self-forgetfulness.”79
The same can be true for you and me, believer. Like Fred, we will glorify God by making the time to abide in him and experience the belovedness that frees us to fully love our neighbors as ourselves (see John 15:1-8).
That could look like recommitting yourself to a morning “quiet time” before work, setting reminders to meditate on God’s love throughout your day, or hanging a visual reminder of God’s love in your office. Whatever works for you, works. But abide we must if we long to glorify God more fully in our work.
3. Mere Christians glorify God by working at a pace that allows them to extend God’s love to others. It wasn’t just a sense of belovedness that led Fred to demonstrate otherworldly kindness to others. It was also his extraordinary lack of hurry.
When Fred’s biographer, Max King, was asked to sum up the message of Fred’s life in a single phrase, he said, “Slow down, be kind.” To Fred, those things were “directly related.”80 Because he understood that you and I must “slow down” in order to “be kind” and show God’s love to those we work with. Which is why Fred urged anyone who would listen to put their “dominant energies into developing a sane design for living.”81
Here again, Jesus served as the perfect model for Fred. As pastor John Mark Comer has pointed out, “If there’s anything you pick up from reading the four Gospels, it’s that Jesus was rarely in a hurry.”82 Even when a child’s life hung in the balance, Jesus moved at a pace that allowed him to attend to the suffering of one daughter on his way to heal another (see Mark 5:21-43).
You and I will glorify God when we model Jesus’s lack of hurry so that we can extend God’s love to those we work with. And Fred Rogers shows us how to do that in a more modern context.
First, budget tons of margin into your calendar. If you think it’s going to take thirty minutes to get to a meeting, budget forty-five. It is exactly this kind of margin that allowed Fred to see and engage with the pain in his coworkers’ lives, like the time he pressed the stop button in the elevator to bless a fellow producer.
Second, resolve to be with who you’re with. Not only did Fred not hurry, but also, when someone entered his presence, he offered them the gift of feeling unhurried. There was no checking his watch. No glancing at mail on his desk. When Fred was with someone, regular time stood still, “Fred time” began, and “urgency seemed to dissipate,” as Fred made the other person feel like the image-bearer of God they were.83 You can do the same today by silencing distractions and resolving to be fully present with who you’re with.
Finally, when you fail to be unhurried, choose the important over the urgent. Fred became more human to me when I heard his son say that there were days when Fred “was rushing home from work, in order to sit down with [his family] for dinner.”84 As his biographer explains, even when Fred failed to have enough margin in his calendar, he “never—ever—let the urgency of work or life impede his focus on what he saw as basic human values: integrity, respect, responsibility…and of course…kindness.”85 God will be glorified when the same is said of you and me.
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73. Hollingsworth, Simple Faith, 20.
74. Charles Spurgeon, “All for Jesus!” (sermon, Metropolitan Tabernacle, London, November 29, 1874), http://www.spurgeongems.org/ sermon/ chs1205.pdf.
75. Fred Rogers, Latrobe High School baccalaureate speech, Latrobe, PA, June 2, 1996.
76. Hollingsworth, Simple Faith, 5.
77. Ibid., 7.
78. King, Good Neighbor, 348.
79. Timothy Keller, The Freedom of Self-Forgetfulness: The Path to True Christian Joy (Chorley, England: 10Publishing,
2012), 32.
80. King, “Maxwell King.”
81. Fred Rogers, speech, Thiel College, Greenville, PA, November 13, 1969.
82. John Mark Comer, The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry: How to Stay Emotionally Healthy and Spiritually Alive in the Chaos of the Modern World (Colorado Springs, CO: WaterBrook, 2019), 89.
83. King, Good Neighbor, 7.
84. Ibid., 295.
85. Ibid., 9.
***
What Does It Look Like to Glorify God In Your Work?
Five Mere Christians, by Jordan Raynor and Kaleigh Cox, uses vivid, fast-paced storytelling to present the captivating lives of five “mere Christians” who will show you what it looks like to follow Christ wherever you live and work.
Through the eyes of Fred Rogers, Fannie Lou Hamer, Ole Kirk Christiansen, Hannah More, and C.S. Lewis, you will gain clear takeaways for modern-day mere Christians looking to glorify God in their own everyday work. The best part? Unlike typical biographies that get bogged down in boring detail, each story in this collection is mercifully short, extremely entertaining, and profoundly helpful.
You don’t have to be a pastor, missionary, or religious professional to seek Christ in your career. Learn more about this book and how to purchase here.
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