Every Monday morning, a quiet transaction takes place in the parking lot.
You sit in your car. Engine off. Coffee in hand. Sunday is still warm in your heart: the hymn, the sermon, your spouse’s hand squeezing yours during the prayer. Then you check the clock, grab your bag, and do what you have done a thousand times.
You leave Jesus in the car.
Nobody told you to. You simply learned the rules. Faith belongs to Sunday. Work belongs to Monday. I have news for you, neighbor. God never built that wall, and I suspect you already know it.
Why is it so easy to leave Him in the car? Because for many of us, the Word has never made the trip from the head to the heart.
John Henry Jowett said it plainly: “If it rests only in the memory, any little care may snatch it away. A thought is never secure until it has passed from the mind into the heart, and has become a desire, an aspiration, a passion.”
Any little care. Monday is made of little cares. A Word that lives only in your memory doesn’t stand a chance.
That is why Moses told Israel, “Fix these words of mine in your hearts and minds; tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads” (Deuteronomy 11:18). Hearts and minds. Hands and foreheads. All of you. And that is why Paul prayed, “that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened in order that you may know the hope to which he has called you” (Ephesians 1:18).
The eyes of your heart. Matthew Henry wrote that faith “demonstrates to the eye of the mind the reality of those things that cannot be discerned by the eye of the body.” In the physical world we say, “I’ll believe it when I see it.” In the spiritual world, it flips. I’ll see it when I believe it.
Can you see Him in the conference room?
In his The Kingdom Agenda sermon series, Dr. Tony Evans says that if you understand one word in the Bible, understand Adam. God put the first Adam in a garden, and as Dr. Evans describes it, it was not his as owner. It was his as manager. Adam failed.
Then came Jesus. “So it is written: ‘The first man Adam became a living being’; the last Adam, a life-giving spirit” (1 Corinthians 15:45). The risen Christ succeeded where Adam failed, and He pours out His Holy Spirit to write His Word on our hearts. The Spirit is how the Word makes the trip from your head to your heart. The Spirit is how Monday changes.
Dr. Evans defines the kingdom agenda as “the visible manifestation of the comprehensive rule of God over every area of life.” Every area. Including the budget meeting. You are not the owner of your job. You are its manager. Someone else holds the deed.
Now let’s talk about the wall.
On January 1, 1802, Thomas Jefferson wrote to the Danbury Baptist Association in Connecticut, a regional Baptist body founded in 1790 in Danbury, CT worried about the infringement of their religious liberty by their state legislature. He assured them that “religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his God,” and that the First Amendment had built “a wall of separation between church and State.”
Whom was that wall protecting? The church. From the state.
Jefferson wrote to defend the believer’s freedom, not to silence it.
“I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should “make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,” thus building a wall of separation between Church & State.”
The full First Amendment says:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
Don’t establish a church. Don’t prohibit the exercise of faith. Here is the part we miss. The “State” in Jefferson’s phrase is the government. Your employer is not the government. Your office has no Congress. The wall was never meant to run through the lobby of a company, and it was certainly never meant to run through your heart.
That is not permission to be obnoxious. It is permission to be whole.
The Next Great Move of God
I have a hero named Fred Rogers.
In 1963, the Presbytery of Pittsburgh ordained him with an unusual charge: to serve children and families through television. He wore a cardigan instead of a collar. For decades, on public television, he told millions of children they were loved just as they were. It was the Gospel’s heartbeat with the Name left unspoken. I believe he understood what the walls of a public stage required, and he stayed faithful inside them.
But I am not on public television.
My stretch dream has always been to become the Mister Rogers for adults. Now I believe God is narrowing the call: Mister Rogers in the Workplace. Same warmth. Same patience. Same sweater, if you like. But no whisper. When someone asks why I am the way I am, I will tell them His name.
Revival breaks out where the people already are. And where are they today? At work. Many of us give the workplace more waking hours than our churches, and often more than our families. As a recent LinkedIn article by Karl Diffenderfer reminds us, Billy Graham is widely quoted as saying, “I believe that one of the next great moves of God is going to be through the believers in the workplace.”
Through the believers. Not around them. Through them. That means you.
Now something hard. I say it as a confession before a critique, because I have spent my career in the marketplace and felt the pull myself.
Corporate America has lost its soul.
Not every company. Not every leader. But the system. We have enthroned the metrics, and the scoreboard has become the sanctuary. Paul says greed “is idolatry” (Colossians 3:5). Jesus says, “You cannot serve both God and Money” (Matthew 6:24).
Let’s be precise. Money is not evil. In redeemed hands, it feeds families, funds missions, and builds schools. It is “the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil” (1 Timothy 6:10, NIV). The problem is never the paycheck. The problem is the throne, and when the love of money takes the throne, Jesus responds:
Jesus entered the temple courts and drove out all who were buying and selling there. He overturned the tables of the money changers and the benches of those selling doves. “It is written,” he said to them, “‘My house will be called a house of prayer,’ but you are making it ‘a den of robbers. (Matthew 21:12-13, NIV)
Look at what He flipped. Not a sinner. A system that had turned a place of worship into a place of profit. He was not angry at commerce. He was jealous for His Father’s house and tender toward the people being fleeced in it.
In God’s Kingdom, Dr. Evans reminds us that worldliness is not a place but a state. “The world of finance” is not a location. It is “a system that deals with money.” You can tell which kingdom you serve not by what you say on Sunday, but by your methods on Monday: how you close the deal, treat the new hire, and report the numbers. Dr. Evans asks the question that belongs on everyone’s screen: Does Jesus have veto power in your life?
I’m not asking you to preach at your coworkers. I’m asking you to be a neighbor to them, in the open. “But in your hearts revere Christ as Lord. Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have. But do this with gentleness and respect” (1 Peter 3:15).
Fathers, your children are watching how you handle pressure. Let them see a man whose word is his bond. Mothers, you are one woman with one Lord. Let the kindness at your desk match the kindness at your table. Husbands, refuse the shortcut and the half-truth. Wives, ask God where to be salt and light this week. Then be.
Start small. Learn names. Pray for your boss by name. Tell the truth about the numbers. When someone asks why you’re different, don’t whisper.
God first. Others second. Myself third. Even at work.
Especially at work.