Work As Worship

My friend Nathan (Nathanael) wrote an article a year or two ago with this same title, and I've been thinking about the idea recently. I'll borrow the title, but go in a slightly different direction than my dear friend, mainly because I'm a different person. :)

The very first thing we read about in the Bible is the story of God working. "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." For the first six days He worked--pretty hard, if He created the entire universe. Then on the seventh day God rested from His work, after He had seen that it was "very good."

In the Garden, humans had work to do. We were to be fruitful and subdue the earth, and God put Adam in the garden "to work it and take care of it" (Gen. 2:15). So work is not simply a product of the fall--it was there in the beginning, as God worked to create, and it was there for us, as those made in God's image.

Work becomes tainted by the fall not in its existence, but in its difficulty, travail and sometimes futility. "By the sweat of your brow shall you eat bread" doesn't mean that working the land is a punishment from God--He gave us this very work in the Garden. But work after the fall involves uncertainty, struggle and a sense of meaningless.

So if this is true, then it fits well with what Paul says in Colossians 3:23-24: "Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for men, since you know that you will receive an inheritance from the Lord as a reward. It is the Lord Christ you are serving." Work, then, is redeemed in Christ to be a form of worship. This is true whatever the nature of your work (although of course you can't be actively sinning by engaging in your work--you can't worship God as you work in prostitution or drug dealing or money laundering). We should look at our work, then, not only as an opportunity given by God to work to care for our needs and others, but as a direct form of worship. (This applies, by the way, regardless of whether our work is "secular" or in ministry--the scripture says "whatever you do." There is no truly secular work for the Christian.) By working sincerely and diligently in our vocations, we are offering up our time and our energies to the Lord, who gave Himself for us. He worked to create us and to redeem us, so we in turn give Him thanks by offering the fruit of our hands and minds to Him.

What a beautiful and glorious truth this is! What if we worked every day with this in mind? Would the work we do have more meaning, more joy and satisfaction? To know that by writing a program to calculate the cost of shipping soap internationally, or counting the bars of (very yummy-smelling) spearmint we have in stock, I am offering up worship to the living God! And the same thing goes for those of us working in construction, at McDonald's, at a bank or hospital or school or farm or church or insurance firm.

Let us rejoice in the opportunity we have to spend six days a week serving the Lord by working (whether at our jobs or at home, etc.), and let us rest in remembrance of God's finished work on the cross. Let us work to worship God, and to honor Him by serving in a way that blesses others. And let us not make work an idol by failing to rest as God rested, so that we acknowledge Him as the source of our providence and of our redemption, and give glory to Him through our work and our rest. "And whatever you do," whether work or rest, "do it all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him" (Col. 3:17).