I heard a thought-provoking line a while ago: “If you wouldn’t do your job for free, then quit.”
Those words had to have come out of the mouth of an upper-middle-class Westerner who is well-educated, well-connected, and has many careers and jobs to choose from. A few weeks ago I was in a remote corner of Southeast Asia where nobody has the luxury of quitting their job. You couldn’t afford to go to school past the 8th grade, so now you have two choices: you can either be a farmer like your father and grandfather were, or you can move hundreds of kilometers away to work in a factory making things like shoelaces. That’s the way it is in most of the world (or even worse!)
We have the incredible blessing of being able to choose a career, then choose a job, then float to another job or even to another career when we’re feeling unfulfilled. We have many opportunities to look for employment where we’ll be able to support ourselves, serve others, and glorify God, as we discovered on Sunday from our guest speaker Harvey Turner.
So we need to ask ourselves the question: “Why do I do what I do?”
Many of us work simply to put food on the table. There’s nothing wrong with that goal — Paul said, “We did not eat anyone’s bread without paying for it, but with toil and labor we worked night and day, that we might not be a burden to any of you … If anyone is not willing to work, let him not eat” (2 Thess. 3:8-10).
We might try to elevate our motives, and work so we can be generous with the money we earn. That’s how the Macedonians lived: “They gave according to their means, as I can testify, and beyond their means, of their own accord” (2 Cor. 8:3).
We might even get radical and start viewing our workplaces as mission fields, as Paul the tentmaker did selling tents in Athens: “He reasoned in the marketplace every day with those who happened to be there” (Acts 17:17).
All of those are good, biblical, commendable motivations to work. But what about the work itself? What purpose does God have for the shovel you wield, or the computer keyboard you pound, or the racks of clothes you organize?
According to Tim Keller, the answer is found in Genesis 2, when Adam was assigned the world’s first job: naming the animals.
The naming of the animals in chapter 2, verse 19-20 is an invitation to enter into God’s creativity. Why didn’t God just name the animals himself? After all, in Genesis 1, God names things, “calling” the light “Day” and the darkness “Night”—so he was clearly capable of naming the animals as well. Yet he invites us to continue his work of developing creation, to develop all the capacities of human and physical nature to build a civilization that glorifies him. Through our work we bring order out of chaos, create new entities, exploit the patterns of creation, and interweave the human community. So whether splicing a gene or doing brain surgery or collecting the rubbish or painting a picture, our work further develops, maintains, or repairs the fabric of the world. In this way, we connect our work to God’s work. (Every Good Endeavor)
Work is a blessing because it’s an opportunity to partner with God in his work of shaping, refining, and renewing the world!