To Work, or Not to Work, That is the Question.
“Whatever you do, do your work heartily, as for the Lord and not for people, knowing that it is from the Lord that you will receive the reward of the inheritance. It is the Lord Christ whom you serve.”
Did you know that man is meant to work? I often talk with men about the false idea that work is a result of the curse found in Genesis 3. There is a common view that because of sin, man now has to work, and it's toilsome and laborious. Part of that is true, but not all of it. Although work is hard, it is much harder than it should have been because of sin and the curse in Genesis 3. We see in verse 17 that God says to Adam, “Because you have listened to the voice of your wife, and have eaten from the tree about which I commanded you, saying, ‘You shall not eat from it,’ cursed is the ground because of you. With hard labor, you shall eat from it all the days of your life. Both thorns and thistles it shall grow for you. Yet you shall eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your face, you shall eat bread, until you return to the ground because from it you were taken. For you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”
So, yeah, work is hard. Instead of creation working for us, it now pushes back against us. But work is good. We were designed even before the fall to work hard and to enjoy our work. Think back to the very beginning in Genesis chapter 1 at the point of creation where God creates man to be His image bearers. In verse 26, God said, “Let Us make man in Our image, after Our likeness, to rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, and over all the earth itself and every creature that crawls upon it. So God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him. Male and female, He created them. God blessed them and said to them, 'Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and every creature that crawls upon the earth.' ”
This creation passage helps us understand a few things about both God and us. Number one, we learn that God is the Creator and Owner of everything. With the whisper of His mouth, He made all the heavens and the earth, everything we can see, touch, taste, and smell. The entirety of the complex cosmos that we can barely understand came into being because God chose to speak. We must never forget that. Number two, we learned that God created mankind to be stewards of His creation. We see three times in this passage that we are created to rule over all creation, to fill the earth and subdue it. We are temporary managers of this earth, being tested for our faithfulness now as we anticipate when Christ returns to establish His kingdom on earth and rule over it perfectly. Finally, number three, we learn that we are made in God's image. Not only are we made to work, we reflect the glory of God through our ruling, subduing, and working hard. In this time, when we work hard, we reflect the ethic of our Creator, which causes us to stand out to the world around us as hard workers, bringing glory to God. So today, this week, and for the rest of your lives, let's change our attitude towards work. As Paul writes in Colossians 3:23-24, "Whatever you do, do your work heartily, as for the Lord and not for people, knowing that it is from the Lord that you will receive the reward of the inheritance. It is the Lord Christ whom you serve."
