Service Rendered to God

Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for
the Lord, not for men.
—Colossians 3:23

If you’re like most people, you probably need a good reason to get up on
Monday morning and go to work. Your tasks may be menial and mindless,
offering little challenge or stimulation. The sameness of it all has taken away
any good reason for doing what you do. What you need is a philosophy of
work that will get you going in the morning.

We labor in a fallen world. The ground works hard because it’s cursed
(Genesis 3:17–19). Creation grinds on in discord, our enemy more often than
our ally, and no amount of work can change that much. Trying to beat the
effects of the Fall simply turns us into workaholics. We think someday our
labor will pay off, but it never does. Thorns and thistles keep cropping up in
our field.

Sin makes everyone and everything more difficult; other workers become our
competitors, bent on grabbing our chips. They want to beat us out of our
hard-earned money.

And apart from what sin has done to others, it’s done something to us. We
have a lazy streak. R & R is more important than work. If we work at all, it’s
to have more leisure, more time in our boat or our condo. Work is merely to
buy more time away from work.

Because we’ve mostly left God out of our lives, work has become our substitute
for security and significance. Our feelings of self-worth are tied to our
work. That’s why upward mobility is so important; more pay and greater
prestige make us feel better about ourselves. And that’s why failure is so
devastating to our egos.

But regeneration changes how we perceive ourselves in relation to our
work. We begin to learn that security and significance come from God, not
what we do. We’re special apart from the work we do. He loves us even if
we’re out of work. And when we begin to see ourselves as He sees us, we don’t
need work to feel worthy. Then work becomes valuable, not as a means to an
end but as an end in itself.

Work is valuable in itself because God works. He’s a hard worker and One
who does His work well. He’s known for His work. When we too do our work
well, when our craftsmanship is sound and our products are well constructed
and worthwhile, we’re more like God.

Trivial and shoddy work, done solely for profit, diminishes us. Money
costs too much when we have to make it that way. We should ask of a job, “Is
it any good?” rather than, “What does it pay?” And we should ask about a
finished product, “Is it worth buying?” rather than, “How can I get people to
buy it?” As Dorothy Sayers said, “Serve the work! If your heart is not wholly
in the work, the work will not be good—and work that is not good serves
neither God nor the community; it only serves Mammon.”

Work is valuable in itself because work can be service rendered to God. In
all our work we work for Him, and no service rendered to Him is trivial. He
sees and it matters to Him. This gives worth to everything we do, even those
things no one else notices or appreciates. Michelangelo, painting in some
dark corner on the Sistine ceiling, was asked by his helper why he was investing
so much time and effort in a part of the painting that no one would ever
see. “God will see!” he said.

The job we left last Friday remains the same, but it can have new meaning
on Monday morning. Our work is significant no matter what we do. We work
because God does; we’re more like Him when we do. And we’re working for
our Lord, an employer who sees and approves. In this frame of mind, we can
whistle while we work.

Taken from Seeing God, © 2006 by David Roper. Used by permission of Discovery House Publishers, Box 3566, Grand Rapids MI 4950l. All rights reserved.