Garden City: Work, Rest, and the Art of Being Human.

by John Mark Comer

with our endless desire comes restlessness.

Both underwork and overwork rob us of the capacity to enjoy God and his world. They make us less human.

Abraham Heschel was spot-on when he said, “There is happiness in the love of labor, there is misery in the love of gain.”

The only slave drivers are the ones in my head.

The world and all the stuff in it are gifts to enjoy, not gods to worship.

God isn’t a commodity. He’s a Spirit. Intangible but real. Invisible but true. He doesn’t have an idol. The closest thing he has is us, his image bearers.

Brian had a lot of rules — chin up, run on the balls of your feet, straight back, eyes forward, arms at a slight angle, and so on. But he wasn’t a legalistic jerk; he was a trainer. He wanted me to get in the best shape of my life and swim, cycle, and run better. See what I’m getting at?

Jesus was known far and wide as a healer. Healing is a tangible expression of the in-breaking kingdom of God. But did you know that almost all of Jesus’ healings take place on the Sabbath? I don’t think that’s a coincidence. Why? Because the Sabbath is a day for healing.

Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann said, “People who keep Sabbath live all seven days differently.”

So there is coming a day, when all the layers of smut and garbage and injustice and blood and exploitation will be burned up and the earth will be found, seen for what it really is, what God intended it to be all along.

this isn’t about the end of the time/space universe, but rather about its radical healing.

Resurrection is what happens after heaven, when we come back here, in a body, on the earth, and we get on with the business of ruling the world. One scholar called it “Life after life after death.”

Our hope isn’t for another place, but another time. Yes, as followers of Jesus, we go to heaven when we die, but we don’t stay there. If Jesus is a “ticket to heaven,” as the preacher says, then he’s a round-trip ticket, not a one-way. Because at the resurrection, we come back.

the story doesn’t end with us going away to heaven, but rather, with heaven’s invasion of Earth. We see Jesus and his followers who have died coming back from heaven to “rule over the earth.”

We have all eternity to live into God’s world. We’ll live another day, another week, another millennium. Yes, time is a precious commodity, but we’re filthy rich. We have plenty of it.

Whatever it is you do — cooking, building, teaching, writing, mothering, project managing, beehive keeping — if you do it as an act of worship to God and an expression of love and service to humanity, that’s enough. Work isn’t a means to an end; it is an end.

Learning how to fight laziness with hard work, and how to fight workaholism with Sabbath.

Whoever you become will carry over into the next life. The saying “You can’t take it with you” may be true of stuff — your car or that sweet new pair of shoes, but it’s definitely misleading. You will take the person you become with you into God’s future. And who you become is your most valuable asset.

Some of the good work we do will actually last into God’s new world. I really believe that. In Revelation 14 we read that the dead “will rest from their labor, for their deeds will follow them.”

Miroslav Volf, the brilliant Croatian philosopher/theologian from Yale, puts it this way: “The noble products of human ingenuity, whatever is beautiful, true and good in human cultures, will be cleansed from impurity, perfected, and transfigured to become a part of God’s new creation. They will form the ‘building materials,’ from which the glorified world will be made.”

people who gave their life to “wood, hay or straw,” the kind of work that is kindling for the fire, will have nothing to show for all their effort and energy.

There is far more continuity between this age and the age to come than most of us think. There is a direct correlation between how we live now and how we will live forever. Or to be more precise, between how we rule now and how much we will rule over forever.

Either way, the point still stands: the reward for work well-done in this age isn’t a mansion and a Maserati in heaven, as if the best God can do is acquiesce to capitalism’s perversion of the American dream; it’s more work and more responsibility in God’s new world.

Envy is when you covet another person’s story.