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October 30, 2020 - January 1, 2021
The gospel assures me that God cares about everything I do and will listen to my prayers.
The gospel reminds us that God cares about the products we make, the companies we work for, and the customers we serve.
In other words, I will continually err and sin, and yet God will prevail in my life through his goodness and grace.
treat all people and their work with dignity. We’re to create an environment in which people can flourish and use their God-given gifts to contribute to society.
expressive individualism.” Elsewhere, Bellah argued that Americans had created a culture that elevated individual choice and expression to such a level that there was no longer any shared life, no commanding truths or values that tied us together.
The sacredness of the individual is not balanced by any sense of the whole or concern for the common good.”
To make a real difference . . . [there would have to be] a reappropriation of the idea of vocation or calling, a return in a new way to the idea of work as a contribution to the good of all and not merely as a means to one’s own advancement.
Today the word often means simply a job, but that was not the original sense. A job is a vocation only if someone else calls you to do it and you do it for them rather than for yourself. And so our work can be a calling only if it is reimagined as a mission of service to something beyond merely our own interests.
When we work, we are, as those in the Lutheran tradition often put it, the “fingers of God,” the agents of his providential love for others. This understanding elevates the purpose of work from making a living to loving our neighbor and at the same time releases us from the crushing burden of working primarily to prove ourselves.
In this Reformed view, the purpose of work is to create a culture that honors God and enables people to thrive.
Everyone imagines accomplishing things, and everyone finds him- or herself largely incapable of producing them.
“In the Lord, your labor is not in vain,” writes Paul in the first letter to the Corinthians,
Your work will be only partially successful, on your best days, in bringing that world about. But inevitably the whole tree that you seek—the beauty, harmony, justice, comfort, joy, and community—will come to fruition. If you know all this, you won’t be despondent because you can get only a leaf or two out in this life. You will work with satisfaction and joy. You will not be puffed up by success or devastated by setbacks.
God made the world not as a warrior digs a trench but as an artist makes a masterpiece.
Like all good and satisfying work, the worker sees himself in it.
The implication is that, while God works for us as our Provider, we also work for him.
“It is perfectly clear that God’s good plan always included human beings working, or, more specifically, living in the constant cycle of work and rest.”
Work did not come in after a golden age of leisure. It was part of God’s perfect design for human life, because we were made in God’s image, and part of his glory and happiness is that he works, as does the Son of God, who said, “My Father is always at his work to this very day, and I too am working” (John 5:17).
Work is as much a basic human need as food, beauty, rest, friendship, prayer, and sexuality; it is not simply medicine but food for our soul. Without meaningful work we sense significant inner loss and emptiness. People who are cut off from work because of physical or other reasons quickly discover how much they need work to thrive emotionally, physically, and spiritually.
Leisure and pleasure are great goods, but we can take only so much of them.
The loss of work is deeply disturbing because we were designed for it.
According to the Bible, we don’t merely need the money from work to survive; we need the work itself to survive and live fully human lives.
Also, work is also one of the ways we discover who we are, because it is through work that we come to understand our distinct abilities and gifts, a major component in our identities.
Freedom is not so much the absence of restrictions as finding the right ones, those that fit with the realities of our own nature and those of the world. 32
So the commandments of God in the Bible are a means of liberation, because through them God calls us to be what he built us to be.
This is not a burdensome command; it is an invitation to freedom
He did not need any restoration of his strength—and yet he rested on the seventh day (Genesis
You will not have a meaningful life without work, but you cannot say that your work is the meaning of your life.
Unless we regularly stop work and take time to worship (which Pieper considers one of the chief activities within “leisure”) and simply contemplate and enjoy the world—including the fruit of our labor—we cannot truly experience meaning in our lives.
Leisure is the condition of considering things in a celebrating spirit. .
But when we feel that our lives are completely absorbed by work, remember that we must also honor work’s limits.
view of these matters is utterly different. Work of all kinds, whether with the hands or the mind, evidences our dignity as human beings—because it reflects the image of God the Creator in us.
other words, while the plants and animals are called to simply “teem” and “reproduce,” only humans are explicitly given a job. They are called to “subdue” and “have dominion,” or rule the earth.
We are called to stand in for God here in the world, exercising stewardship over the rest of creation in his place as his vice-regents.
We share in doing the things that God has done in creation—bringing order out of chaos, creatively building a civilization out of the material of physical and human nature, caring for all that God has made. This is a major part of what we were created to be.
Work has dignity because it is something that God does and because we do it in God’s place, as his representatives
God’s own work in Genesis 1 and 2 is “manual” labor, as he shapes us out of the dust of the earth, deliberately putting a spirit in a physical body, and as he plants a garden (Genesis 2:8).
“If God came into the world, what would he be like? For the ancient Greeks, he might have been a philosopher-king. The ancient Romans might have looked for a just and noble statesman. But how does the God of the Hebrews come into the world? As a carpenter.” 47
But in Genesis we see God as a gardener, and in the New Testament we see him as a carpenter.
This also means that “secular” work has no less dignity and nobility than the “sacred” work of ministry.
How can we say one kind of work is high and noble and the other low and debasing?
God seems to delight in diversity and creativity.
including our labor. We were built for work and the dignity it gives us as human beings, regardless of its status or pay.
We have the freedom to seek work that suits our gifts and passions. We can be open to greater opportunities for work when the economy is weak and jobs are less plentiful.
Human beings “filling the earth” means something far than plants and animals filling the earth. It means civilization, not just procreation.
He made it our job to develop and build this society.
So we are not to relate to the world as park rangers, whose job is not to change their space, but to preserve things as they are. Nor are we to “pave over the garden” of the created world to make a parking lot. No, we are to be gardeners who take an active stance toward their charge.
Through our work we bring order out of chaos, create new entities, exploit the patterns of creation, and interweave the human community.
the idea that work is a “vocation” or calling, “a contribution to the good of all and not merely . . . a means to one’s own advancement,” to one’s self-fulfillment and power.
Our daily work can be a calling only if it is reconceived as God’s assignment to serve others. And that is exactly how the Bible teaches us to view work.
