Perspectives on The Theology of Work By R. Scott Rodin

Finding Purpose and Dignity in Work

“Does it strike you as odd that we just celebrated ‘Labor’ Day by taking a day off work? 

There is a societal disconnect between honoring labor in name and addressing the realities and dignity of work. Perhaps one reason for this is our distorted secular understanding of the role and value of work, which seems to be just as prevalent in the church. Despite the abundance of brilliant writing and teaching available to the body of Christ, we still seem to approach our work from a wholly secular perspective. I joke that one of the most reliable sources for truth, clarity, and an accurate prophetic word comes to us through the words of country western music. Don’t believe me? Consider these poignant perspectives on work.

• “Ya better not try and stand in my way, ’cause I’m walkin’ out the door. Take this job and shove it! I ain’t working here no more.” – Johnny Paycheck
• “Workin’ nine to five, what a way to make a livin’. Barely getting by, it’s all take and no giving. They just used your mind, and they never give you credit. It’s enough to make you crazy if you let it.” – Dolly Parton.
• “You load sixteen tons, what do you get? Another day older and deeper in debt. Saint Peter don’t you call me ’cause I can’t go: I owe my soul to the company store.” – Tennessee Ernie Ford
• “Why’s the rich man busy dancing, while the poor man pays the band? Oh, they’re billing me for killing me. Lord have mercy on the working man!” – Travis Tritt.

No truer words may have been spoken about the prevailing attitude we have toward our jobs and our vocations. These lyrics are a small sample of the way work is treated thematically in this genre of music. It’s toilsome, relentless, thankless, and a process that gets us nowhere. It is something to be endured, the hard road that must be trodden from Monday to Friday before we can finally get away and enjoy two days of ‘real-life’.

A Word on Retirement

Another perspective comes to us from the way our society venerates retirement at the expense of working. One television campaign showed people on their first day of retirement: a man standing in his Bermuda shorts chipping golf balls into his swimming pool, a couple dancing as the voice-over announcer crooned, “it’s their first day of retirement and they have absolutely nothing on their agenda”, and a man smugly sitting in his fishing boat proclaiming, “retirement is the only job I ever wanted.”

This is the deal we make with the devil. Suppose we’re willing to invest 30 or 40 years in wearisome toil, in meaningless activities, in a thankless, relentless job. In that case, our reward will be the financial freedom to supposedly control enough of the things around us to bring us happiness, finally!

More recently, a 22-year-old millionaire stated what most entrepreneurs admit only in quiet resignation. He confessed (unapologetically) that “work-life balance’ will keep you mediocre.” In the piece, he revealed he had “eliminated work-life balance entirely” and “just worked” to make his dreams come true. His concluding comment is telling: “When you front-load success early, you buy the luxury of choice for the rest of your life.”

There it is. The deal with the devil. The promise that work is only a means to an end. Real life comes after work. That’s our culture.

It is not God’s plan.

Understanding God’s Plan

God’s plan is revealed to us in the book of Genesis. God made human beings and immediately put them to work. On the last day of God’s work of creation, he crowns that creation by creating the one who would go on to tend and manage the world God created. Bearing the image of our creator, we work, make, and tend. God set Adam in the garden and told him the purpose of his creation: to be a coworker with God and a caretaker of what God had created.

Now personally, I wish God had handed Adam a 5-weight fly rod, put his feet in a mountain stream, and told him, “Fish it.” Surely that was God’s true intent in creating us! But I digress.

The point here is that he didn’t send him on vacation, hand him a good book, shuffle him off to a golf course, string up a hammock, or turn on the ball game. There’s nothing wrong with all these things, but they are not the primary purpose for which we were created.

Finding Purpose

God created us for work because work was created by God specifically for us and for our good. Labor has an inherent goodness; therefore, the reward for it is in the labor, not the pay. We are called to it with excellence because it reflects the image of God in us. Work is not a means to an end; it is not what we endure to get to the ‘good life.’ It is not the vegetables we have to eat before we get to dessert. Work is the end, not the means to an end. We don’t work to live, we live (and we’re created) to work.

There are two purposes for work we find in scripture. I will touch on them briefly.

A Sacred Partnership

The first is that work is a partnership with God in his great work. God created the animals and then partnered with humanity to name them. He made the plants and partnered with us to care for them. God created man and woman and said, “We’re partners, be fruitful, multiply, and fill the earth.” Everything we do in this world, when viewed from the Kingdom perspective, is seen as a participation in God’s work and purpose.

That means there’s always something more going on than just the work we see. Do you see God at work in your work? Do you work to honor him, to partner with him? That is the larger concept we cannot miss in this theology of work. As image bearers of our creator God, all of us have a work that we were created to do. That work is bigger than the job we hold. It encompasses that job, but it’s greater than that job. For this reason, a person could lose their job, but they never lose their work. A person may retire from their vocation, but they never lose their actual work. There is only one day in our lives where we will truly retire from the work God created us to do, and that is the day he calls us home.

An Expression of Worship

The second component of that theology of work is understanding that our work is, in fact, our worship. The Hebrew word for prayer is עֲבוֹדָה (avodah). This may surprise you, but it is the same word for work. And service. This is because God always envisioned that our work would be our primary place of worship. Here, we need to destroy any division between the secular and the sacred. All of life is God’s, including our work. We are never more fully human than when we are at work, and that work is a form of worship to the one who created us for and sustains us in that work.

As worship, our work should fill us up. Our work should bring satisfaction, fulfillment, meaning, purpose, and yes, deep contentment. We were created for work that fills us so that we can, in turn, fill others in our lives. When we return home from a day of work, our cups should be overflowing, spilling out enough that we can splash all over our spouses, children, friends, neighbors, and community. If, on the other hand, our work drains us, we go home like empty vessels, needy and desiring others to fill us up.

Jesus As a Role Model

Perhaps the best way to illustrate this is to imagine a day in Jesus’s workshop. If you spent eight hours working side by side with Jesus, watching a master carpenter work, how do you think you would feel when you went home? Depleted or filled up? I imagine we’d each go home rejoicing at the opportunity to have spent a whole day in his presence, watching the way he approached work, listening to how he interacted with others, marveling at his craftsmanship, and laughing at his humanity. All of this is part of the joy of work when done in partnership with the one who created us for work.

Well, don’t we actually co-labor with Jesus every day? If we walked with Jesus every minute of every day, would that not transform our work into worship?

This is a theology of work that leads us to deep contentment. We will have good days, bad days, awful days. Yet in all of them, let’s consider the works of our hands as acts of worship to glorify God. Let’s view our work as part of God’s great work in the world. Let’s seek to glorify him in all we do. Then even our hardest days will be transformed into worship, and our labor into a source of our most profound contentment.

R. Scott Rodin is the Senior Consultant/Chief Strategy Officer for The Focus Group. Over the past thirty-eight years, Scott Rodin has helped hundreds of organizations enhance their effectiveness in leadership, fundraising, strategic planning, and board development. His books and articles have been translated into over twenty languages, and he has taught and consulted with ministries across five continents. Scott also serves as a Senior Fellow of the Association of Biblical Higher Education and as board chair for ChinaSource.

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