God Loves Your Work

Discover Why He Sends You to Do What You Do

Larry Peabody

• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781666795011, 9781666794991
• eBook ISBN: 9781666795028
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

If you know God loves your work, you can--as Paul put it--"work at it with all your heart." But too often even Christians find it hard to engage fully with what occupies them for hours every day. This book will help you relate your work to God's eternal kingdom purposes. Here you will find not just one or two but several biblical reasons for getting up and going to work. During your lifetime you will spend, perhaps, 100, 000 hours working in paid or unpaid work. Will you see spiritual significance in those hours? In the end, will they really matter? These easy-to-read chapters will help you view your daily work within a new and much larger perspective. For example, what if you were to begin seeing your work as a worship offering that God gladly receives? Or what if you were to discover how he intends to use your work to further your own spiritual growth? Get set to move from "Thank God, it's Friday!" to "Wonderful, it's Monday again!"

1

He Started It!

I grew up with dirty hands. My work as a farm boy—planting, weeding, harvesting—got my hands grimy. Often, after I had pulled weeds all day, the stains in my fingers could be removed only with bleach. The work of mechanics, roofers, and painters leaves their hands a mess, too. They may have to clean up with industrial-strength hand cleaners.

What about God? Do his hands ever get dirty?

God’s Dirty Work

Okay, I don’t think God has physical thumbs and fingers. Even so, the Bible speaks time after time about his hands. The story of God getting his hands dirty begins in the Genesis account of creation. That narrative leaves no doubt that God is not above such work.

Have you noticed whenever you read the story that God did not make Adam like he made everything else? He said, “Let there be light,” but did not say, “Let there be a man.” No. Instead, God formed Adam. That verb suggests squeezing into a shape—as a child might shape a cookie out of Play-Doh.

But God didn’t use modeling clay. He picked up some dust. Plain old earth-dirt. Then, after forming Adam, God—working like a surgeon—opened a wound in Adam’s flesh, removed a rib, and made Eve. God’s messy work didn’t end there. In another task, instead of delegating the grubby work to an angel, he himself planted a garden.

From farm-boy experience, I know planting gets done in dirt. And later, after his human creatures ignored his clear instructions, God took on the task of a tailor or leatherworker. He made clothes for them out of what must have been blood-soaked animal skins. The point? Right from the start of the Bible, God reveals himself to be a worker.

The Demeaning of Work

Think of the working people you know. How would you describe their typical attitude toward work? Is it an irritating interruption between weekends? Do they see it as just a way to bring home enough money to pay for what they really want to have and to do? Is the job merely an annoying nuisance to put up with until retirement?

This whole idea that work is a bother may well trace back to what ancient Greeks thought about working. Their culture launched much of what we take for granted today. Philosophy. Mathematics. Juries. Even democracy. Another hand-me-down from the Greeks was their attitude toward work.

The Greek gods saw work as degrading. One writer says, instead of working, they partied, plotted and warred against each other, and made love. Someone else has written, “Hypnos . . . is the one whose mantra is ‘less work and more sleep.’”1

This attitude of their gods seeped into the way the Greeks saw work. And no wonder. As the Bible explains, “those who make idols are just like them, as are all who trust in them” (Ps 135:18, NLT). So if the fake gods of the Greeks wanted to avoid hard and dirty work, those who worshiped them saw work that way too. Even their philosophers, like Plato and Aristotle, saw work—especially with one’s hands—as something unfit for human beings.

The True God Works

But long before those Greeks invented their phony, lazy gods, the true God had revealed himself to the Hebrew people as a working God—a God willing to get his hands dirty. Jesus, the God-Man, was born into the home of a manual laborer, learned the trade, and wore calluses on his hands. He later clinched the truth that God is a worker when he said, “My Father is always at his work to this very day, and I too am working” (John 5:17). As Christians, we also become like the One we worship. And so for us, this means all legitimate work, whether with hands or head, paid or unpaid, carries honor and dignity. Why? Because it reflects the all-wise Maker of everything.

I recently taught a course on living out faith in the workplace for a church in a neighboring town, In the first session, one of the women in the class said, “It never occurred to me to go back to Genesis to see how work began.” Does a lack of focus on Genesis explain why this God-as-Worker truth catches many Christians by surprise? Our Bibles begin with these five words: “In the beginning God created . . .” Word 4 tells us God exists. Word 5 tells us he works.

Tim Keller and Katherine Leary Alsdorf open chapter 1 of their book Every Good Endeavor by saying, “The Bible begins talking about work as soon as it begins talking about anything—that is how important and basic it is. The author of the book of Genesis describes God’s creation of the world as work.”2

Well, yes, someone may object, “But the work God did must have been far easier for him than the hassles I put up with day after day, week after week, and year after year. God didn’t have to cope with cranky bosses, crashing hard drives, and absurd deadlines.”

True. But what God did still qualifies as work. Webster defines the noun “work” as “activity in which one exerts strength or faculties to do or perform something.”3 Certainly God exerted both his strength and his faculties in creating the heavens and the earth. And in doing so, he performed something. So—if we define it like that—God did indeed work.

Work Is Good

I have taught faith-at-work classes online for several years. My students have come from many countries. Some have been told by their Christian leaders that God needed a way to punish sinful people—and so he came up with work. God’s curse, these Christians were told, launched work. So they learned early on to connect work with sin. Yes, they must work to pay the bills and feed their families. But working in a so-called “secular” job leaves them with an uneasy conscience.

Knowing God as First Worker can free us up. Why? Because seeing him that way corrects a lot of disabling ideas about work. If God is totally good (and he is), ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Preface
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: He Started It!
• Chapter 2: God-Reflectors
• Chapter 3: God Rescues Work
• Chapter 4: Work as Worship
• Chapter 5: Let’s Pause
• Chapter 6: Manage God’s Earth
• Chapter 7: Your Share
• Chapter 8: The Light Shines
• Chapter 9: Blessing God’s World
• Chapter 10: Encouraging Believers
• Chapter 11: Embodying Truth
• Chapter 12: Call to Action
• Chapter 13: Working to Obey
• Chapter 14: Close the Divide
• Chapter 15: Become Like Christ
• Chapter 16: Watch How I Work
• Chapter 17: Caution: Money at Work
• Chapter 19: Support Yourself and Your Family
• Chapter 19: Make Enough to Share
• Epilogue
• Bibliography