Part One
The Day at Work
āAnd now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.ā
1 Corinthians 13:13
āWe continually remember before our God and Father your work produced by faith, your labor prompted by love, and your endurance inspired by hope in our Lord Jesus Christ.ā
1 Thessalonians 1:3
Faith: Doing Godās Work
Love: Recovering the Amateur Status of the Christian
Hope: Making Our Mark on Heaven
1
Faith
Doing Godās Work
āThere is no work better than another to please God; to pour water, to wash dishes, to be a souter [cobbler], or an apostle, all are one, as touching the deed, to please God.ā
William Tyndale
If I cannot find God in the middle of my workāwhere my concerns and worries, pains, and joys areāit does not make sense to try to find Him in the hours set free at the periphery of my life.ā
Henri Nouwen
Some time ago I finished building a cedar deck for our tiny country cabin. It has a tempered glass perimeter so our grandchildren can safely push their noses to the glass while they look at the constantly-changing sea dazzling in reflected light below. An arbutus tree grows awkwardly through the middle exactly where a table would normally be placed. But the tree belongs. So we will sit around the tree. The day I finished building the deck, I repeatedly walked out the front door to view it from different angles. Over and again I said to myself (and to God?), āIt is good! It is beautiful!ā echoing Godās satisfaction over his own labors (Gen 1:10, 12, 18, 25, 31). I wondered if God enjoyed and appreciated my deck as much as I did! For simple satisfaction in a job well done turns into egoism if not returned to God. But if it is returned to God it is multiplied into praise. So even something as mundane as building a deck can become an act of worship.
Far from being a diversion from the spiritual life, work takes us directly to God through its creative possibilities and its purifying pressures. The professor in Ecclesiastes concludes when he examines his life āunder the sunā that work does not fully satisfy because we will probably be followed by a fool, and our work is toil, anxious striving, grief, and pain (Eccl 2:17ā24). So the relative meaninglessness of work makes our experience of labor into an evangelist inviting us to find our fulfillment in God through our work, rather than finding our fulfillment in our work through God, an important though subtle distinction. Our experience of work shows us that man does not live by bread alone. But some work, namely work commonly associated with ministry functions, seems to be dealing with bread for eternity, not bread for today. This raises a fundamental question: What makes a personās work Christian?
In āThe Day at Workā we will explore one biblical answer: what makes work Christian is faith, hope, and love. A sermon can be delivered for the devilās glory and a sweater knitted as a sacrament. It is faith, hope, and love that make the difference. It is not the exterior form of the work that makes it Christian but the interiority of itāthe spirituality of work. This approach is contrary to the spoken and unspoken message of the church. Exploring working in faith (in this chapter), love, and hope (in the next two chapters) will provide a spiritual understanding of work that is based on the Word of God. It is an important question, partly because work occupies such a large part of our lives.
The average North American person spends some 88,000 hours on the job from the first day of full-time employment until retirement. Work occupies about 40 percent of his or her waking life. In contrast, a dedicated Christian is estimated to spend as few as 4000 hours in a lifetime in church meetings and church-related activities. Concentrating on this latter, the church has made spirituality into a leisure-time, discretionary-time involvement that provides a welcome relief from the boredom of much work, or from the idolatrous demands of the marketplace. But true spirituality is more subversive than that. It sneaks into the center of our lives rather than the circumference, compelling us to find God in the down-to-earth rather than the up-in-heaven. We have a down-to-earth God who went through the complete human experience from conception to resurrection. So to be God-like people we must become equipped to work for God and, as we shall see, to work with God. For both God and humankind are workers and work is a powerful link between the Creator and his creating creatures.
God at Work
The first worker is God. Work is a place to meet God. Indeed we actually do the work of God and we do this with God. The Bible opens with God hard at work, crafting things and people. God scrapes up dust (which he had carefully made) and breathes into the molded clay (Gen 2:7), imparting his interior being into an artistic expression of himself: shaping, separating, speaking, and forming. The Bible ends with God still at work recreating and transfiguring what he and his creatures have madeāa city with beautiful metals and precious stones extracted from the earth now shaped exquisitely to embellish our ultimate environment (Rev 21ā22). Apart from keeping Sabbath, which turns out to be the inner meaning of both his work and ours, God never stops working. Nor does Jesus (John 5:17); nor should humankind. For work is not only our duty but our dignity.
āDoing the work of the Lordā is often thought to be things like preaching, evangelizing, and giving pastoral care. But the Bible shows us that Godās work in creation, sustenance, redemption, and consummation is much more than religious activity. God is a shepherd, potter, homemaker, vinedresser, farmer, craftsperson, metal smith, and tentmaker. By inviting humankind to āfill the earth and subdue itā (Gen 1:28), to ārule over . . . every living creatureā (1:28), and to āwork [the garden] and take care of itā (2:15), God includes people in Godās own work. This involves designing, building, beautifying, embellishing, maintaining, providing hospitality, nourishing, informing, evaluating, communicating, revealing outcomes, mending, healing, bringing meaning, making cultures, and bringing joy. We are like Godāmade in Godās imageāin our work. The first recorded work of human beings was a scientific oneātaxonomyānaming the animals. There is hardly a human occupation that does not in some way involve being a co-worker with God: plumbing, garbage collecting, data processing, hairstyling, politics, art, newspaper reporting, town planning, landscape gardening, lab technology, and, of course, preaching and equipping the saints (Eph 4:11ā12). Why then is work so hardāeven so-called āChristian workāāand why is it so difficult to āfind God in the middle of my workā as Henri Nouwen proposes in the words cited at the beginning of this chapter?
Working for Jesus
The idea that Jesus is our boss is not a new one in Christian circles; but it is seldom understood. At a very preliminary level it means that we are ultimately accountable to Jesus for the stewardship of the gifts and talents with which he trusted us. The parable of the Talents would lead us at least that far (Matt 25:14ā30). It is a sin to squander what God has given us to use, or to wrap up our talents, our ideas, and our dreams in a handkerchief and bury them for fear of losing them through a risky experiment or doing our work incorrectly. We are accountable for the investment of our lives. We may sympathize with the one-talent person but w...