Who’s Watching Wednesday? Work as Service

A recent Gallup poll about the workplace caught my attention. The survey measured workplace engagement: whether you’re actually engaged with the work in front of you, or mentally somewhere else while your body sits in a chair. In January 2025, the number hit a ten-year low. Only thirty-one percent of American workers were engaged. Seventeen percent had checked out entirely. And the other fifty-two percent? Well, the real majority are somewhere in between: showing up, doing what’s asked, but nothing that isn’t asked.

I found that middle group to be the real story, although less dramatic. This group is not storming out or getting fired for some cause. Their work looks more like replying without reading the whole email. A report finished without a second look. The task done to specs but not one degree past it. Gallup’s own researchers point to a specific cause: fewer workers say their manager makes it clear what’s expected of them, and fewer say anyone at work actually seems to care whether they do it well.

Pastors aren't immune to a lack of engagement either. I have to guard against the same attitude when I’m standing in a pulpit, or a meeting room, or doing a hundred ordinary tasks when nobody is really watching.

The fact is our effort has a way of matching whether someone’s paying attention.

Long before the Gallup poll, someone wrote a letter to workers with far less freedom than you or I will ever have. It asks a sharper question than how engaged you are at work. It asks who you think is watching you when you work.

Paul Lingers at the Bottom

The letter I’m referring to is Paul’s letter to the Colossian church, where he writes this line: “And whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him” (Colossians 3:17). It reads like a nice general principle, the kind of line that sounds true but not very specific, until you read what he says in the rest of the passage.

He doesn’t leave “whatever you do” in the abstract. He walks it through an entire household of that era, one relationship at a time. He addresses it to wives and husbands — they get two verses. Then children and fathers — they also get two verses. And then Paul reaches slaves and their masters, and he deals with them longer than the others, addressing them over four verses.

In case you’re thinking I’m trying to make something out of nothing by noting that Paul’s instructions to servants and masters were a few sentences longer, I want you to recognize that it was not by accident. The servants in the Colossian church had the least reason of anyone in the room to believe “whatever you do” applied to them.

Roman slavery had some significant differences from what we think about when we hear the term. Some servants worked as bankers, overseers, and household managers, not only laborers. But even then, they had no leverage, no promotion coming, no real say over their own labor, and no way to simply quit and find something better.

If Paul’s instruction to “do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus” was going to affect the work ethic of the church culture, this is exactly where he had to prove it, with the people who had the least motivation to obey it.

So Paul lingers here on purpose. If the principle holds for servants, it holds everywhere else too. Paul’s very next words explain exactly how he expected it to work.

The Supervisor Swap

Before going further, I should say plainly that Paul is not the one who invented slavery, and this passage certainly does not endorse it. Rather, he’s telling Christians how to live with integrity inside a broken, flawed cultural system. Scripture regulates conduct inside the world’s systems, but should never be interpreted as blessing the broken systems themselves.

It is the brokenness of the system that adds weight to Paul’s words when he writes: “Bondservants, obey in everything those who are your earthly masters, not by way of eye-service, as people-pleasers, but with sincerity of heart, fearing the Lord” (Colossians 3:22).

The word “eye-service” is what I want to draw your focus to. Not laziness. Not incompetence. This is a particular kind of work failure. It is service performed specifically because somebody’s watching. It’s the same attitude that shows up in our work environment the moment a supervisor walks by and then disappears when he walks away.

This caught my attention not just because it is manipulative or an indication of poor work ethic. I was struck by how Paul suggested fixing it. He does not suggest stricter self-discipline or a list of social expectations for servants. Surprisingly, he suggested changing the audience.

“Whatever you do, work heartily, as for the Lord and not for men” (Colossians 3:23).

Read that again slowly. He tells servants they work for someone else entirely — a different Master.

Imagine how it changes one’s perspective on their work if they recognize they are working for the Lord. This kind of motivation would not only affect Rome's slave industry, but it is a mechanism that would revolutionize the issue sitting underneath the Gallup poll numbers from earlier. Effort follows attention. Change who you believe is paying attention, and the effort changes with it.

It’s an insightful principle. It’s also, on the surface, an easy one to write from behind a desk with a fair salary and a reasonable boss. I wonder if Paul actually knew what he was asking of them — and of us.

The Weight of the Command

I mentioned that Roman slavery covered a striking range of work — bankers, overseers, physicians, estate managers, right alongside field hands and mine laborers. Yet I want to stress that you should not assume Rome's servant-culture was similar to our Western occupational experience. Whatever job a slave held, he remained, according to Roman law, property. He had no standing to bring a case to court on his own behalf. And a master’s power over his body was nearly absolute, and for most of the first century, almost entirely unchecked.

Keith Bradley, one of the leading historians of Roman slavery, describes the system as a steep hierarchy. At the top, a slave could manage an estate, even own slaves of his own, and be remembered with an elaborate epitaph. But at the bottom, slaves were subject to routine brutality and physical abuse. Eventually, Rome passed reforms limiting an owner’s power and cruelty. However, the power of masters to abuse their slaves went largely unchecked no matter what the law said on paper.

A man named Seneca — a contemporary of Paul, writing in the same decade Colossians was likely composed — wrote a letter arguing for more humane treatment of slaves. He opened the letter by admitting that Romans in general were, in his own words, excessively haughty, cruel, and insulting toward the people who served them.

The point I’m making here is simply that the Roman slave’s work environment was more difficult than a Monday morning in the American workforce. Ancient slavery did not amount to having a bad job. Yet a comparison of poor work ethic runs through both eras. If sincerity of heart could be commanded under a system where a hiccup at the dinner table might earn a slave the lash, then whatever complaint sits behind a rough performance review or an unreasonable manager clears a considerably lower bar by comparison.

Paul is laying out an expectation that deeply convicts us in our work environment. Who we work for transforms how we work. And this concept is so far-reaching that, two verses later, Paul addresses how it changes the way masters treat their servants. In 4:1, he writes: “Masters, treat your bondservants justly and fairly, knowing that you also have a Master in heaven.” In other words, working “for the Lord” not only makes one a better employee, but it also makes one a better boss, too.

The Verdict

Perhaps you’ve read my thoughts so far and, though you agree, it sounds like too much effort in your current line of employment. It’s worth noting that Paul indicates a change in supervisors also affects your pay — or perhaps I should say, your retirement. 

“Knowing that from the Lord you will receive the inheritance as your reward” (Colossians 3:24). 

In a culture where servants received no reward for trying harder, no promotion coming, nothing to work toward, it was radical to suggest that changing who you work for changes the reward for your labor, too. But believers labor with an eternal perspective, and eternal wages outweigh any temporal benefit.

Still, there’s the other side of the coin. In the very next verse, Paul turns to judgment: “For the wrongdoer will be paid back for the wrong he has done, and there is no partiality” (Colossians 3:25).

The word Paul chooses for “wrongdoer” — one who does evil, one who wrongs another — is broader than one who commits a job infraction. It names an error of the heart that affects the character of worker and the boss alike. And a reckoning day is coming — the ultimate job review. A reckoning in front of a real Judge who sees past whatever eye-service attitude we’ve demonstrated on the job site. Both servant (worker) and master (boss) will stand before God. No partiality means no one gets to be the exception — not the servant cutting corners, and not the boss abusing his position.

So here is the question I present to you: has your work — or your leadership — been eye-service? Is your effort and integrity calibrated to whoever’s watching, and to whatever you can get away with when they’re not? Or is the Lord the one you’re serving?

Go back to that Gallup poll for a second. Thirty-one percent of the workforce is engaged on the job. Seventeen percent are checked out entirely. Fifty-two percent are doing exactly enough to get by. None of those numbers are really about ability. They’re about audience — who we believe is watching us work, and whether that person seems to care.

Paul’s answer to work ethic issues was a supervisor swap: trade eye-service for sincerity of heart, and it will transform your work whether anyone is watching or not.

Now, before you close this and go back to whatever’s sitting in your inbox, take a moment to get real with yourself. That report that nobody will double-check? Or, in my case, the sermon prepared for a Sunday that might be forgotten by Wednesday? The load of dishes, the oil change, the meeting that runs long? Has that work been adjusted to whoever’s checking — or do you actually believe the Lord is your real boss, especially in the places nobody is watching at all?

The question is this: Who is really watching you work?