Nice work - a biblical understanding of labour

I want to stress the importance of all work, the importance of your work in God's sight.
But let me say at the start that you will always be more important than your work and that your character matters to God more than your achievements. In a society which has little to say about the first and endlessly exalts the second, this is a vital Christian perspective.
Put another way, some of the greatest achievements are unsung by the world because they have been made in the realm of the spirit. However, Christian people should have a theology of work.

'Work'

The Bible is full of it. We first meet God at work as Creator: the great Physicist, Engineer, Botanist, Zoologist and Biologist. He is still the Sustainer of all and our Guide, Teacher, Healer and Partner. 'My Father is working still and I am working' said Jesus to his critics.
In Genesis 1.26 and 2.15 those made in his image are made to work, and through the Bible we have an album of photographs of working people: farmers, weavers, leather-workers, merchants, judges, soldiers, businessmen and women, homemakers, midwives, teachers, masters and servants. And we know who became a carpenter in Nazareth.

Jesus and work

If Jesus had been brought up in a monastery we might have thought that religion had no relevance to everyday life in the real world. But Christianity is founded on the knowledge that God has entered our race: and when he came of age in his humanity he entered a trade, and developed a skill. This is not so surprising when you consider that it was by the Son of God that the worlds were made. As we open our Bibles we first meet God in his working clothes.
In Genesis we read: 'The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it'. Adam was not to be idle in Eden and we (whether employed or not) are not to be idle either. We find much of our duty in the work we do and much of our dignity too. It is part of our humanness, even part of our identity. We get a sense of satisfaction from it and make a serious contribution to society in it. Most of all we can please and glorify God by the work we do, whether it is impressive or menial, seen or unseen, large or small.

Work - we need it!

I was fascinated to read a while back at the national lottery company that more than half its new millionaires are still working! All of which confirms that we were made to work, that it is part of the image of God in us.
I was thinking the other day that every job of work you have done or are doing, God has done before you in principle. Furthermore, whatever you are doing at work God is doing with you, interested, concerned, helping (but not doing it for you!) and ready to say at the end of the day: 'We've had a good day today, son, daughter, haven't we?' It's a sad mistake to think you only please God when you look up from the job and pray: God is pleased and glorified when you do the job well with full concentration and involvement as one of his children. When the surgeon is operating on me I don't want him to be thinking of Daily Light or praying about his unconverted neighbour: I want him to be thinking about me - and so does God!
However, please don't think that I am going to romanticise work in this article. The Bible is a very realistic book. Though it begins in the Garden of Eden it doesn't stay there long. In Genesis chapter 3 we read of mankind's first disobedience, the rebellion and treachery of the man and his wife who try to be 'like God' by eating the forbidden fruit.

Work and the Fall

'Whereas work before the Fall was a blessing, after the Fall it had to cope with the curse inflicted on the world because of sin (Genesis 3.17-19). However, as Leland Ayken points out in Work and Leisure in a Christian perspective (IVP, 1989, p.129): 'The Fall changed work but did not cancel work as a duty'. The new element is that it must now be accomplished 'against the hostility of the environment in which work occurs . . . striving against forces that resist the workers' efforts' and encountering that frustration and meaninglessness that Ecclesiastes talks about. Sinful men and women themselves provide much of this in exploitation, corruption, bad workmanship and idleness.'
The result of all this is that the workplace is not only a place of satisfaction, but also a place of conflict, uncertainty and stress.
'Beneath the apparently tedious, bland surface of office life, with its euphemisms and its formal ways and its elaborate circumlocutions, every known emotion and motivation seethes and bubbles - ambition, greed, ruthlessness, duplicity, cowardice, treachery, lust, kindliness, tolerance, forgiveness, affection and even love.' (from The Chatto Book of Office Life, edited by Jeremy Lewis).

Society's work crisis today

Some years ago a researcher in the US, Stud Terkel, produced a 589-page book which has become something of a classic on contemporary attitudes toward work. It goes a long way to showing that our society is suffering from a work crisis. We still live in the world of the Fall for all our technological and other advancements. His opening paragraph reads: 'This book, being about work, is, by its very nature, about violence - to the spirit as well as to the body. It is about ulcers as well as accidents . . . about nervous breakdowns as well as kicking the dog around. It is, above all (or beneath all), about daily humiliations. To survive the day is triumph enough for the walking wounded among the great many of us' (Working: people talk about what they do all day and how they feel about what they do, by Stud Terkel, quoted in Leland Ayken's Work and Leisure in Christian perspective, p.44.)
Yet it is precisely in that sort of world God has put us: it is in that sort of world the Bible speaks and it is for life and work in that sort of world that the Bible and the Holy Spirit equips us. Listen to the apostle Paul in Ephesians 6.5-9. It wasn't easy then and it isn't easy now. But it is possible: triumphantly, gloriously possible. The Christian man or woman can be a worker of integrity; a peace-maker known to resolve conflict, a help by word and deed.

Witness at work

'Lewis Trippett was a lawyer working for a telephone company in the States. One day a woman came in from the accounts department. He had never seen her before. She asked him if he was Lewis Trippett. With some trepidation he replied: 'Yes, I am.' Then she said: 'You're the only one in this department with any integrity - don't change. Everyone else abuses their expenses.' Then as abruptly as she came, she left. Little things make a difference. (From Mark Green's Thank God it's Monday). 'Let your light shine before men that they may see your good deeds and praise your Father in heaven.' This is a main part of what the New Testament calls 'worship'.
You may be surprised to learn that in the New Testament the term 'worship' is connected with daily life more than with 'going to church'.

Work and worship

In the New Testament 'worship' is the consecration of our bodily lives and daily walk and work (Romans 12.1). We do not just go to church to worship but we go to work to worship too. In the one we worship by adoration, and in the other we worship by imitation - working as God works: creatively, purposefully, reliably and righteously. Working to help others as well as ourselves, contributing to the common good, to the good of society, its strong and its weak, those who can help us in return and those who cannot. And we do so to God's glory and in grateful love for our creation, preservation and salvation. As the Puritan John Cotton says: 'All the life I live, is by faith in the Son of God' (quoted in Ayken, p. 135).
It's significant there that I should quote someone who was in the Puritan tradition, because a new light was shone on the whole subject of work by the 16th-century Reformers and the 17th-century Puritans. Let me explain.
The Greeks had no concept of the dignity of labour. (Plato's Republic was built on a slave class). The Romans saw unskilled labour as unworthy and sordid. The Church of the Middle Ages and earlier saw secular work as second-best. The 16th-century Renaissance recognised the dignity of crafts and the arts.
But the Protestant Reformers, Luther, Calvin, and the 17th-century Puritans recognised the dignity of all labour and raised it to the level of 'vocation', i.e. a calling from God.

Three callings

They commonly spoke of three callings. First of all God calls us to a godly life: he calls us to come to Christ his Son in repentance and faith and to take him as our Lord and Saviour. This is the supreme calling which takes precedence over all else in life.
Secondly, God calls us to specific spiritual ministries and tasks among the communities of his people in the church. His Holy Spirit equips us with gifts for just that: that we might encourage and 'build up' one another.
However, they also went on to say that there was a third calling from God - the call to our different ordinary every-day occupations. They raised the common man and woman's daily job to the level of a divine vocation. Farmhand or milkmaid, miller or merchant, housewife or pastor, all had their calling to that work from God who valued them and their work and could be served and glorified in precisely that work done well and to his glory.
The apostle Paul tells the young church at Corinth where some people have become 'super-spiritual' and even seem to be hanging loose to important earthly ties and duties in marriage and work: 'Each one should retain the place in life that the Lord had assigned to him and to which God has called him' (1 Corinthians 7.17).
Let me say at once that all this was said, not to 'keep the workers down', but to affirm them in their work and place in life and society, not to keep people down but to raise them up. We are called to be equally valued here. And God values everyone's work.
We need everyone's work if we are to live in a decent and prosperous society. Our work connects us all in any society; our own work is our gift and God's gift to that society. The doctor and the dustman need each other, for if the dustman can't safely do without the doctor, neither can the doctor do without the dustman. If he thinks he can, let him see how long he survives knee-deep in garbage. 'Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart. It is the Lord Christ you are serving' (from Colossians 3.23-24).

His work in his world

Always remember God is interested in your work and in your task, however humble or mundane it may seem, because it is his work too. His work in his world, a work sustained in every part by his goodness and mercy. From crops to computers, his wisdom and kindness keeps our world going and our human race moving forward.