Most of us have a complicated relationship with work, don’t we? Some of us absolutely hate it. We dread getting out of bed in the morning, knowing we have to head into the office. Or, we don’t like logging on because we wish we had an office we could head into. Some of us love it way too much, so much that our spouses or others we love question whether we have to work so much. Perhaps we find ourselves secretly working from home, responding to emails, or answering phone calls in the backyard, all while hoping to avoid detection. A lot of us have a love/hate relationship with work, depending on the day. In so many ways, our relationship with work is dysfunctional.
Work is a gift from the Lord, and even as I write these words, I know some of you are rolling your eyes and thinking, “Oh, really? Well, you don’t work for my boss,” or “You don’t have my job.” The truth is that God intends for us to work and intended it from the beginning. In Genesis 1:28, God’s first charge to Adam and Eve was to “be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth and subdue it.” This was a call to work long before they sinned. The late Tim Keller reminds us that we are made for work: “Work is as much a basic human need as food, beauty, rest, friendship, prayer, and sexuality; it is not simply medicine but food for our soul.”
Former Christianity Today editor and author Andy Crouch notes that work is the fruitful transformation of the world through human effort and skill. God created the world with what the reformers called “latent potentialities.” This implies that the world’s initial creation did not fully unfold or reveal everything that would eventually exist within it. God intended us to partner with him in creation, to join him in taking those things that he created that are good and making them very good through our work—taking eggs and making omelets, taking wood and making tables and paper on which we’d write books and symphonies, and so on.
Does God need us and our work to unfold his creation? Of course not; he’s God; he can do it without us. But, like a loving father taking his young child to work with him, our Father wants us to join him in his work as an opportunity to build intimacy with him and as a way to shape and mold us into something we were not before. Crouch has also noted that work is not only about what we do but about who we are becoming through what we do. God uses work in the process of sanctifying us, of making us new.
There are ways we abuse work, and like abusing all things God created for his glory and our good, doing so causes us to sin and gets us into all sorts of trouble. One of the chief ways we abuse work is to avoid it altogether or to view it as drudgery. We may be tempted to perform minimally at work, only putting in our best effort when the boss is watching, and to criticize the work and the people at work when they are absent. Colossians 3:22 warns workers to be careful about “eye-service” meaning just doing work to get by while we’re being watched or taking our work for granted.
The truth is that sometimes work is hard, and sometimes the people we work with and for are either unethical, incompetent, or both. While we may not currently hold the world’s greatest job, serving God’s glory through our work gives it new meaning. Viewing it through God’s lens, even the most menial work has dignity and grace. We worship him when we do it well. Sure, it’s good to be a witness for Christ to our coworkers because that’s playing out the Great Commission. But it’s also bringing glory to God, being his disciple, and building his kingdom when we simply do our work nobly and well. If you’re selling insurance, working a call center, or digging ditches, your work matters as much to the kingdom of God as mine, your pastors, or the President of the United States.
Your work may not involve winning souls for Jesus every day (mine doesn’t either, by the way—there are a lot of phone calls, meetings, travel, and reading spreadsheets in what I do, too). Still, if your work contributes to the common good, making someone’s life better, it is divine, noble, and God-breathed. You should be proud of it in the Lord and do it well.
Another way we abuse work is to worship it. We may be slow to admit that, but when we can’t put work down, can’t stop thinking about it, can’t stop checking in at the office, and work nights and weekends, when it gives our lives security and meaning and value and worth, worship is exactly what we’re doing. Being addicted to alcohol or drugs is a socially lousy deal—it carries a stigma, changes your appearance, and it often leads to you breaking the law. Conversely, being addicted to work can bring earthly rewards—more money, admiration of your peers, and advancement in your organization. That’s what makes work addiction, or worship, so insidious. No one really thinks they’re helping out their wife and kids when they’re spending all day at the bar. It’s easy to justify being a good provider when you’re always working.
The antidote to work worship is the Sabbath. Although the Sabbath and rest are rooted in creation, God initially gave the Sabbath as a commandment to his chosen people, Israelites, who had spent 400 years enslaved to the Egyptians, 400 years without a day off. They didn’t know how to do anything but work, and so God gave them the commandment to teach them how to rest—not just resting from their work, giving them a sense of the limits he had created for them, but to give them the game-changing, healing realization that he is God. He has all of creation and work in his hands, and nothing hinges on us. This is actually very good news because we make very bad gods, and we’ll always let other people and ourselves down. Sabbath is a sign of trust in God to help me accomplish his will, not mine.
If you’re a work-worshipper, discover the Sabbath. I hate to admit I came to it painfully late in my work life, yet practicing it has freed me.
We don’t often think of work as a form of spiritual warfare, but it is. I learned this insight from author Blake Healy, in his book Indestructible, as he reflected on the life of King David. David was Israel’s greatest king and a man after God’s heart. But there was one time in his life when he fell into chaos. 2 Samuel 11 tells us, “In the spring, at the time when kings go off to war, David sent Joab out with the king’s men and the whole Israelite army…but David remained in Jerusalem.” And we know what happened, don’t we? When he saw Bathsheba bathing on the roof, he felt compelled to have her, which resulted in her becoming pregnant. He then had her husband killed to conceal the pregnancy.
This whole sordid period of David’s life began because he sat out of the work God called him to do. David was a warrior king, and his victories on the battlefield were as much a part of his relationship with God as his worship.
Like David, we are created to strive, push forward, and achieve something. This is part of our purpose. We are designed, as Healy says, to require forward momentum and growth. Healy calls us to rest, but not from this striving and forward momentum. Our work provides us with these things, and when we stop striving and moving forward, as King David did, we expose ourselves to temptation from the enemy. I’ve said this before, and I’m sure it’s true for women, too, but many men I’ve known had too much money and time on their hands. They stopped working, stopped striving, and gave the enemy a way in.
We talk a lot about calling and vocation at Grace because we want our students to begin thinking now about work, how they are made and gifted and impassioned, and what God is calling them to be and do. In his classic, The Call, Os Guinness defines the primary calling that we all have as “the truth that God calls us to himself so decisively that everything we are, everything we do, and everything we have is invested with a special devotion and dynamism lived out as a response to his summons and service.” All of us have the first calling of an intimate relationship with Jesus, before any life task or place.
Guinness defines secondary calling as a person’s response to God’s summons to use their gifts in the world. Secondary callings can include work, volunteer activities, and home life. Most people think of this when they think of “calling.” But the beautiful thing about realizing that we’re all called first and foremost to intimacy with Jesus and glorifying him is that, even if we never reach or find a secondary calling, we all can fulfill God’s call on our lives. If you hate your job or think there’s something better out there, pray that God will show you and lead you. In the meantime, know that whatever you’re doing (as long as it’s ethical and legal) is still what God has called you to do and find peace in that.
You also have no idea how God is going to use it. Before I came to Grace, what I now consider my life’s work, I spent ten years practicing law. I worked for an excellent law firm in Tyler, Ramey & Flock. I worked with very good people, many of whom loved Jesus, and I tried to do good work as unto the Lord. Yet I never felt like it was a great fit for my gifting and passion, and so I asked the Lord to lead me to something else. I waited eight years for him to move me. Eight years of praying every day, of trusting him, and also trying to do my work nobly and well.
I don’t know how great of a lawyer I was, but I was allowed to recruit and interview new lawyers for the firm. Through my work, I recruited and interviewed Jamy Skaggs, Shannon Dacus, Andy Stinson, and Nathaniel Moran to Tyler and to our firm. I rarely list people’s names in this blog, but I list these because if you’re from around here, you know several or all of them. They are great leaders in our community. And God used my work, work I didn’t feel really cut out for but tried to do well for him, to bring them here.
Would God have brought them here otherwise if it wasn’t for me if I wasn’t at that firm? He probably would have. But that’s not the point. The point is that he used my work to bless our community and still does so today because he is good and he loves us.
He is doing the same thing with you at work, you know? In big and small, seen and unseen ways. Every single day.
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