I Have to Do It Their Way

There is a part of it you do badly on purpose, and you have never admitted that to anybody.

Not badly enough that anyone would notice. Just a little short of the way you would do it if it were yours. The step you think is pointless gets done at about eighty per cent, and you have told yourself that is efficiency, and it is not efficiency, it is a small protest that nobody has ever received.

I know because it is what people do. When you cannot argue with a method, you register the disagreement in the work itself, quietly, where it cannot be answered.

So let me say plainly what this is not going to be. It is not going to tell you that God requires you to comply with a commercial arrangement. He does not. This is a contract between two parties and it is not a spiritual authority, and anybody who tells you otherwise is using Scripture to do a company's work for it.

And if the thing you disagree with is not merely different but actually wrong, this is not your article and I will point you to the right one before we finish.

What I have come with is narrower and I think it is the thing that is actually eating you.

Whatsoever ye do, do it heartily

There is a line in Colossians that gets used badly, so I want to read what it actually says rather than what it gets made to say.

And whatsoever ye do, do it heartily, as to the Lord, and not unto men. (Colossians 3:23, King James Version)

As to the Lord, and not unto men.

Notice the direction. It does not say obey men wholeheartedly. It says that whatever the work is, the wholeheartedness is aimed somewhere else entirely, past the person who set the task.

Which means the quality of the work is not a statement about the method. It is not agreement, it is not endorsement, and it is not a vote. It is aimed at God, over the head of whoever wrote the manual, and it never touches them on the way.

Colossians 3:23 sends the wholeheartedness past men rather than at them, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets a person do a thing properly without it meaning they approve of it.

You are able to do it well without it being a signature on anything, and the quality has never once been an endorsement. Colossians 3:23 says do it heartily, as to the Lord, and not unto men, and the Holy Spirit is the one who points the effort past the person who wrote the instruction.

Doing it properly is not agreeing

Here is the knot, and I want to untie it slowly, because I think it has been tied for years.

You believe that if you do their way properly, you have conceded the argument. That doing it well is a kind of statement, and that the only honest way to hold a disagreement is to hold it in your hands as well as your head.

That is not true and it is costing you a great deal. Colossians 3:23 does not say it anywhere, and the Holy Spirit has never once asked for your agreement as the price of your craft.

A craftsman who does a job to a specification they would not have written is not lying. They are doing a job to a specification. The disagreement is intact and unspoken and entirely yours, and Colossians 3:23 does not ask you to give it up, and the Holy Spirit is not asking for your opinion as the price of your integrity.

What the eighty per cent version actually does is hand the disagreement to the customer, who did not ask for it and cannot do anything with it, and who receives a slightly worse thing for a reason they will never know.

Colossians 3:23 puts the standard of the work under God rather than under the person who set it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets a person disagree in full and work in full at the same time.

You are free to think it is wrong and do it right, and those two have never once been in conflict. The written word aims the wholeheartedness at the Lord and not at men, and the Spirit of God is the one who lets a disagreement live in a person without leaking into their hands.

And where it is actually wrong

Now the boundary, and I am not going to blur it.

Everything above is about a method you think is inferior. A worse sequence, a pointless step, a policy that annoys you and costs a customer four minutes. That is disagreement, and disagreement can be held quietly while the work is done well.

If what you are being asked to do is dishonest, or unsafe, or harms somebody, that is not a difference of method and none of this applies. Do not do it properly. Do not do it at all. That belongs in the article on when the name fails, and honesty there is not disloyalty, and it is worth getting real advice from somebody qualified rather than from a page.

Colossians 3:23 governs the wholehearted doing of ordinary work and was never a license for anything else, and the Holy Spirit does not ask anybody to be excellent at a wrong thing.

You are able to tell the difference between inferior and wrong, and the verse has never once covered the second one. Colossians 3:23 addresses the doing of ordinary work as to the Lord, and the Spirit of God is the one who keeps a person honest about which of the two they are actually holding.