Why We Work
It can be hard to remember what work used to look like before this bewildering year. Did you get to serve coffee with a smile instead of a squirt of hand sanitizer? Did you get to write an entire email in one sitting without being interrupted by the children who now share your home office?
As the coronavirus’ shadow continues to stretch into the future, it can leave us longing for what used to be. But the good ‘ole days weren’t all good either.
We still fell short of our productivity goals more often than not. We still had spilled coffee and computer problems (and the occasional coffee-spilled-on-the-computer problem). There were still days we questioned whether the work was worth doing at all, so dogged was it by setbacks and our own shortcomings.
That’s because the good work, which God laid out for his image bearers to do when he created that first pair of humans, was quickly tainted by their sin.
This virus is a new strain of sin’s same-old consequences, one that has a unique ability to draw the sin out of each of us as we continue to endure work and life in close quarters. But its continued presence also gives us an opportunity to remember and rehearse the theology of work: Why it’s good, why it’s hard, why it’s still worth doing, and when it will be redeemed.
WORK IS GOOD
Let’s start by looking at the first time the Bible mentions work. In the beginning, God creates the world and all that is in it; land and sea, birds and beasts, plants of every kind. And then, the triune God says, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness” before giving men and women dominion over all that he had created (Gen. 1:26). It isn’t until the description of the seventh day, when “God finished his work that he had done in creation,” that we see the word “work,” referring to all the action that just unfolded (Gen. 2:2).
So, God’s act of creation was work. And he created us in his image, “to work it and keep it” (Gen. 2:15)
Much as we might picture paradise differently, the Garden of Eden was a delight not because of a lack of work but because of the presence of the Lord as they worked. Adam and Eve worked alongside God to cultivate creation and they walked with him in the cool of the day. Their work, pre-fall, was free of frustration, futility, failure, and pain.
Imagine, for a moment, gardening alongside the Creator before the fall, before sin tainted it all. No swatting away mosquitoes to harvest the last of the tomatoes, pockmarked by the other garden pests. No toiling over tulip bulbs only to have them eaten by the squirrels. Human work was only good, as God intended.
As Gene Edward Veith Jr. writes in his book, God at Work: Your Christian Vocation in All of Life, this means, “human work is an imitation of God’s work, a participation in God’s creation and His creativity. Ruling, subduing, multiplying, causing plants to grow, making things—these are what God does, and yet God gives them as tasks to human beings.”
This is a marvel to me, when I stop and think about it. God makes humans and then he invites humans into the work of creating other humans. God calls us to himself as disciples and then invites us into the Great Commission work of making other disciples. The same is true of the other, more mundane work that fills our days. In one sense, it has inherent goodness, because we inherited it from our Creator. Whether we are writing articles, caring for children or serving food to make a living, the work is an invitation to participate in God’s provision for us.
WORK IS HARD
But anyone who’s worked a day in his or her life knows how hard it is. It was hard before the coronavirus left us juggling extra loads of child-caring, home-schooling and anxiety on top of work demands (for those still fortunate enough to have paying work to do). We can trace that hardness back to what happened just after God gave those first humans work, declared it good, and gave them a pretty simple rule to follow (spoiler: they broke it).
Tempted by Satan in the form of a serpent, Eve and Adam ate of the one tree in the garden God had told them was off-limits. Suddenly, all that had been easy—being with God, being with one another, working on and eating from the earth’s bounty—became hard and cursed.
The food that had come freely from the trees and plants of the garden would now come “By the sweat of (their) faces” (Gen. 3:19). They would still work, but now it would be hard and frustrating, and sometimes it would produce nothing at all.
Their bodies would labor and toil over their work, and the work itself would be inherently foiled by this taint of sin (Gen. 3:17-18).
The writer of Ecclesiastes also observes how difficult and seemingly futile work can feel, calling it “toil” throughout: “What,” he asks, “do people gain from all the toil at which they toil under the sun?” (Ecc. 1:3).
Surely, he reasons momentarily, it is so hard and results in so little that it cannot be worth doing. Instead, we should just find a way to “eat and drink and be joyful” (Ecc. 8:15). Kick the work to another day, or to another year.
Our work is also difficult because God chooses to sanctify us through the trials, tribulations, and failures that are sure to come with that work. This is good news. This means that while, yes, work will be hard, that hardness now has meaning. When things don’t go your way, you can engage with the crisis and with the one we know controls it by saying in the midst, “God, use this for your glory and my good.”
1 Peter 4 tells us that “Since, therefore, Christ suffered in the flesh, to arm ourselves with this same way of thinking.” This is what studying theology is all about. When we learn to preach the overarching theology of suffering and of work to ourselves, we can be ready to interpret the trials we encounter in light of these truths. So when things get hard, we don’t just doubt our calling and say, “Well, maybe God’s trying to get me to quit my job.”
Instead, we can ask what does it look like to “count it all joy, when we face trials of various kinds” in the work of our days? It doesn’t mean we’re thrilled about the nitty gritty of the trial, but that we fix our eyes on the end goal. That goal is not just getting through the day, but it is to value our sanctification and our Savior more than the ease that we desire in this life.
But the story of our work doesn’t end there. It is good to acknowledge that the work is hard, to remember why that is, and to persevere anyway.
WORK IS STILL WORTH DOING
The good news is that the God who isn’t finished with us isn’t finished with our work, either. He desires to use our work in all forms to do a good work in us, for his glory. “For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them” (Eph. 2:10).
Just as Genesis 3:17 lays out the effects of the fall on our work, “cursed is the ground because of you,” Colossians 3:17 lays out our hope that God can redeem and use the work of our days. Paul tells the Colossians who have newly put on Christ to continue doing their work. “And whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him.”
If we are to do everything in the name of—or to the glory of—Jesus, that means everything we do can bring the Lord glory. The work of our hands, though cursed and hard and unseen at times, can be redeemed when it’s done for the Redeemer.
In spite of the struggle, and even though things will probably and frequently go wrong, we can throw ourselves into our work knowing that it is God who is really at work—in us, in others and in his world—as we do. Sometimes this looks like giving God the glory when you’ve reached the height of your career and the credits roll. But, far more often, it looks like the Lord working in you patience when a promotion is delayed.
Therefore, “whatever you do, work heartily, as for the Lord and not for men, knowing that from the Lord you will receive the inheritance as your reward. You are serving the Lord Christ” (Col. 3:23-24).
That’s the essence of the doctrine of vocation. God cares about what you do. He has called you into specific roles. And he uses every scrap of your work:
To bring himself glory
To provide for and love the people he made
And to make you more like him
God created us with a deep desire to perform useful work and to bring him glory. And the God who can be glorified when you work a tidy 40-hour week while your kids are out of sight at school (remember those days?) can also rend glory from in the messy, utterly dependent way you are being forced to work in this current season.
But he also doesn’t leave our work in this unfinished state.
WORK WILL BE REDEEMED
The best part about our work on this earth, unfinished and beset by sin as it is, is that it doesn’t end here. It will be redeemed in more ways than one.
In one sense, God is doing a redemptive work already in and through us as we carry out the work of today. That means a day in which we get “nothing done” could be the day in which he does far more in us that we cannot see. He also waters, grows, and multiplies the good bits of work we do—this is especially true of discipleship work—resulting in a much greater harvest.
Whatever the work, he can use every ounce of it for his glory and our good. May we have eyes to see more clearly how he is already doing this, that we may join in the good work he has for us today.
In a greater sense, God is also intending to redeem our work as it finds its consummation not in this life, but in the kingdom to come. Just as there was good work for Adam and Eve to do in the garden, there will be good work for us to do in the coming kingdom. This will be the mountain peak of our careers as image bearers, working alongside the Lord and one another without the stain of sin, exercising our gifts to the glory of the Lord and “enjoy[ing] the work of [our] hands” (Isa. 65:21-22).
Until then, we rehearse. We remain. We rejoice in the little glimpses of a work well done. And we strive to be “always excelling in the work of the Lord, because [we] know that in the Lord [our] labor is not in vain” (1 Cor. 15:58).
Whitney K. Pipkin is an image-bearer, married mom of three and journalist living in the Washington, D.C. area. She is a recent graduate of the GCD Writers’ Mentoring Cohort and a member of Grace Bible Church in Lorton, VA. Read more of her writing on her website or social media.