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

by John Mark Comer

If it weren’t for the curses — on both the family and the field — we would look to whatever it is we do for work or rest, and we would find it. And nothing could be more disastrous for the world than God’s image bearers finding identity and belonging and even satisfaction apart from him.

Sabbath is a day to pull up a chair, sink into it, look back over the work of the last six days, and just enjoy.

The Sabbath has a life-giving ability to procreate — to fill the world up with life.

Think of the Sabbath like a weekly holiday. You don’t just wake up on Christmas morning and think, What should we do today? No, you get ready for it. The same is true for Thanksgiving or the Fourth of July or your birthday or anniversary — you plan and prep and shop and look forward to it for days at a time.

Here’s what I’m saying: there is a rhythm to this world. For six days we rule and subdue and work and draw out and labor and bleed and wrestle and fight with the ground. But then we take a step back, and for twenty-four hours, we sabbath, we enjoy the fruit of our labor, we delight in God and his world, we celebrate life, we rest, and we worship.

You can skip the Sabbath — it’s not sin. It’s just stupid. You can eat concrete — it’s not sin. It’s just dumb.

You can even rest to the glory of God. When you enjoy the world as God intended — with a cup of coffee, a nap in a hammock, a good meal, time with friends, it glorifies God — it calls attention to the Creator’s presence and beauty all around us. And when you do all that in a spirit of gratitude, letting the goodness of your world and life conjure up an awareness of God and a love for him, then rest becomes worship.

No matter how much you produce, it’s never enough. You live under the ominous shadow of the daily quota — more, more, more! And it wasn’t just Pharaoh screaming for more and more. It was the economic system of Egypt as a whole. Israel wasn’t just making bricks; they were making bricks to build supply cities.11 Entire cities for Pharaoh and his oligarchy to store their extra stuff.

Cheap labor means cheap clothing, cheap food, cheap goods and services, cheap gas, cheap technology, and so on. Slavery sounds a lot like 30 percent off. Think of the saying, “This shirt was a steal.” It’s unnerving how accurate that statement is. Everything we enjoy costs something. And if it doesn’t cost us, it costs someone else. Pharaoh is alive and well.

You can’t drive down the road or stand in a grocery-store line or open your computer without Egypt screaming at you, Get more, own more, have more! Who cares where it comes from? Who cares what it costs those below you? You work hard. You deserve it. You don’t have enough.

There’s a little bit of Pharaoh in all of us. Our endless desire for more. And with our endless desire comes restlessness.

Americans are working more than ever before. One study I read recently said that from 1973 to 1990 the average workweek went up from 41 hours to 47 hours. And that’s not too bad, but over the same time period the amount of time spent on rest went down 37 percent! This is due in large part to technology. So-called “labor-saving devices” have actually skyrocketed the amount of hours we work. You used to have to go into the office or to the jobsite to work. Now all you have to do is reach over and grab your phone off your bedside table.

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

Sabbath is a way to say ENOUGH! Enough work. Work is a good thing, but it’s not the thing. There’s more to life than production.

Consumerism is a thief, a bandit. It takes more than it gives. Because for every one thing you get, there are ten more things you discover you want.

But there’s a whole lot of stuff that falls into the nebulous middle. So, where it’s unclear, ask the follow-up question, Is this life-giving? If it feels like rest for you, and if it feels like worship, then go for it.

As if the Sabbath is legalistic, or it’s part of the Law. But keep in mind that the Sabbath predates the Law by thousands of years. It’s more of a rhythm in creation than a rule in a book.

Read a magazine or visit a website or go to a store that would make me want more— because on the Sabbath, we have enough.

Right before Sabbath starts, I walk through my pre-Sabbath ritual. I go into my home office, clear off my desk, put away my to-do list, power down my computer, turn off my phone, and put it all in the closet.

Jesus is the embodiment of the Sabbath. He’s the seventh day in flesh and blood. We can come to him and find rest, not just on the Sabbath, but all week long.

That horrific phrase “It’s all gonna burn” comes from a misreading of a letter written by Peter, one of Jesus’ disciples. I would argue it’s borderline heretical. Bare minimum, it’s a warping of what Peter actually said. Listen to his statement:

But we all know that story. The earth wasn’t destroyed in the sense of wiped out or ceasing to exist; it was destroyed in that the slate was wiped clean. It was a global restart.

We were made to work, and we will work forever. And before you get sad about that, realize it’s in a world where the curse has been undone. The “painful toil” is gone. We will not “labor in vain.” Our work will be exciting, fun, challenging, rewarding, fascinating, energizing, significant, and custom fit for who we are.

This, my friends, is where it gets interesting. 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.”

Most of the time it’s just called “sleep” — a way of saying that the dead are still alive in a sense but are waiting for resurrection.

But then in two passages in Paul’s writings, we read that at death we are “with the Lord” — so apparently, sleep is a metaphor. We are actually awake and aware of God’s presence. But other than that, Paul doesn’t say much, except that it will be a really good experience.

And this new world that we come back to is never once called heaven by any of the biblical authors.

I think of the end of 1 Corinthians 15 — the longest passage about resurrection and the age to come in the entire Bible. Fifty-eight verses of dense, heady, complex, in-depth, technical, charged, explosive eschatology. And listen to Paul’s closing paragraph — this is the end of his sermon, his “practical application points”: “Therefore, my dear brothers and sisters, stand firm. Let nothing move you. Always give yourselves fully to the work of the Lord, because you know that your labor in the Lord is not in vain.”2 So what Paul thinks resurrection means is that our “work” and “labor” are not in vain. They’re not all for nothing. They matter.

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.

And I would argue that we’re not just learning the skills of character, but we’re learning the skills of the craft.

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.

Not only that, but here’s my third thought, 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.”9 Their deeds will follow them? The word deeds is ergon in Greek. Usually it’s translated “work,” but it can also be translated “occupation.” So our work will follow us? Maybe even our occupation will follow us, past death and into the age to come.

So, for my architect friend Tony, the houses he makes in this life won’t last forever, but we’ll need houses in the coming world. And every single design, every idea, every innovation, every new green, sustainable technology he comes up with has the potential to follow him into the age to come. If that doesn’t make you want to get really good at your job, I have no clue what will.

Know that all good work done in this age will be rewarded in the age to come. 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.

Even if your work now doesn’t feel that way. Even if you’re a sanitation engineer or a gofer on a construction crew or housekeeping for a hotel or a checker at Whole Foods. Maybe you love what you do, maybe you hate it. Maybe you can change what you do, maybe you’re stuck. But either way, you can do it for a reward.

“Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for human masters, since you know that you will receive an inheritance from the Lord as a reward. It is the Lord Christ you are serving.”

And it’s to slaves that Paul writes whatever you do, give it your very best because you’re actually not working for your human master; you’re working for Jesus himself.

I just read this great story about the French composer Olivier Messiaen and his famous piece Quartet for the End of Time. It was written in the winter of 1941. Messiaen was captured by the Nazis and put in Stalag 8-A, a concentration camp in Görlitz, Germany. While in prison, facing a brutally cruel lifestyle, he spent time reading the four gospels and Revelation. As a follower of Jesus, he was somehow filled with hope for the world, right in the middle of hell on Earth. When he realized there were three other famous musicians in the camp, he found four instruments — a cello with a missing string, a beat up violin, a well-worn clarinet, and a piano with keys that stuck together — and he composed an incredible piece of chamber music. The New Yorker later called it “the most ethereally beautiful music of the twentieth century.”16 They first played it in January, right in the middle of the concentration camp, to hundreds of prisoners and guards, in the freezing cold. Messiaen later said, “The cold was excruciating, the Stalag buried under snow, the four performers played on broken down instruments . . . but never have I had an audience who listened with such rapt attention.”

We devolve from a desire to be great to a desire to be thought of as great.

The word “first” can also be translated “great.” Jesus essentially says, “You desire to be great? Okay, I put that in you. Here’s how — become a servant.” The word “servant” is diakanos. It means “one who waits on tables.” It can even be translated “waiter,” like at a restaurant.

At one point the Greek philosopher Plato said, “How can a man be happy when he has to serve someone?”3 He was summing up the ethos of the day. But to Jesus, the way to happiness, to the “life that is truly life,” was through serving other people.

The root of this is what the writers of the Bible call envy. Envy is when you covet another person’s story. What greed is to money, envy is to life as a whole. It’s when you look at a coworker or sibling or friend from college or celebrity and think, I want that life.

That’s why envy sucks the joy right out of life. Because rather than enjoying who you are and what you do and the life that’s spread out in front of you, you covet somebody else’s story.

And what is Jesus’ example of work deserving of a reward from God himself? A glass of water. A small, insignificant, nonglamourous act of love and service. It’s easy to think that to be great and to get a reward from God, we have to do something high status. We have to change the world.

Whatever your calling is, whatever you end up doing with your life — please, please don’t do it for yourself. That’s such an overdone, cliché, uncreative way of living. We’ve been there, done that. It’s a waste of oxygen. Do your work as an expression of love and service, ultimately to God, and then to your neighbor.