My life alongside God's word, volume 3. 'Daily Christian discipleship' section.
Christians do work as their worship
For the Christian all of life is integrated worship. This obviously includes his or her church life. Sometimes overlooked are his home life, her family life, her social life and his work life. Every one of these aspects of life must be seen as genuine “worship” for the true follower of our Lord Jesus Christ, just as much as singing and clapping through songs in and around the Sunday services.
Worship means, to give honour to God, to declare He alone is worthy of special praise, prayer and service, not only on Sundays but each day of every week. “True worship is done in love, truth, respect and humility”. Replace the word ‘worship’ with ‘work’ (in bold twice above) and read the lines again.
Since most people work for at least eight hours, five or six days a week, work is the single thing we spend more time doing than anything else in life, except for sleeping! This alone makes it essential that Christians see work as a big part of their worship, deliberately offered to God.
To work means “to have a job”, usually one that you are paid to do, and, “to spend time and use physical or mental effort trying to achieve something”. In physics work is, “the process of changing energy from one form into another, usually in order to make something move or operate”. A person’s wages are part of themselves converted into pounds or dollars.
In the Bible God is seen to work in the Creation account. Nine phrases are used to describe God’s work in Genesis 1:1-2:3. Many of them are repeated. Here are the first time uses: “God created”, 1:1; “God said”, 1:3; “God saw”, 1:4; “God called”, 1:5; “God made”, 1:7; “God set”, 1:17; “God blessed”, 1:22; “God gave”, 1:29; and “God rested”, 2:2. Look for them again in the chapters.
I love Genesis 2:2, “By the seventh day God had finished the work He had been doing”. To finish is to complete something. God built incredibly long-lasting systems into our world to govern our time, our space, our boundaries, and our reproduction, each “according to their various kinds”, 1:11-12, 1:21, 1:24-25, so that seasons, climate and the land would each meet the needs of life for all. What a great God we worship!
And do not miss Genesis 1:27, human beings are “created in the image of God”. God the Son, our Lord Jesus Christ on earth, was “the image of the invisible God”, Colossians 1:15. The only person ever to live with no sin, Jesus was 100% so like God, people who saw Him actually saw God. God displayed Himself in Jesus. What God did Jesus did. And remember, Jesus studied as a student, Luke 2:46-47, 51-52; He worked as a carpenter, Luke 3:23, Mark 6:3, Matthew 13:55; He worked as a travelling teacher, He worked miracles to meet other peoples’ needs for food, health and safety. You and I are to be like Him – in His image – in our attitudes to all of the work we do.
Psalm 111 describes “the works of the Lord”, vs.2. Do you see your work in the same way that God obviously sees His? Since you are in His image, you surely should? Work is, “great, delightful, glorious, majestic, memorable, providing, powerful, faithful, just, trustworthy, and upright”, vs.2-9, etc.
It is true that hard, tough and difficult work is the result of humankind’s fall into sin, Genesis 3:17-19. But work itself is not a curse. The Genesis account shows how man was to work in the Garden of Eden even before the Fall, Genesis 2:4-5, 15, 19-20. All people are designed to work by our Creator God. To deny this by doing as little work as possible is to fight against God’s plan for our lives. Worldly people may do this, but Christians are called to be different. We must lead others by our example, Genesis 3:23-24, 4:2;
Exodus 20:8-11; Proverbs 18:9.
The earliest Church had collections to make sure no-one suffered unbearable hardship in times of oppression and famine, Acts 4:32-37, 11:27-30; 1 Corinthians 16:1-3; 2 Corinthians 8:1-7. Christians knew it was wrong for people to be idle when they should be working to provide for themselves and share with the wider families, 2 Thessalonians 3:6-15;
1 Timothy 6:17-19.
The letters have strong words criticising any who do not work as they should. “… Take special note of him. Do not associate with him, in order that he may feel ashamed”,
2 Thessalonians 3:14.
Early believers understood from Creation, and from the character of God Himself, that their work was a vitally important part of their Christian lives, and therefore of their Christian worship. People were urged to worship seven days a week by offering their worldly work to God, seeing it as a sacrifice of praise. “Offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God–this is your spiritual act of worship. … Be transformed by the renewing of your mind”, Romans 12:1-2.
The Hebrew word pa’al means ‘to work, act or function’. As’ah means ‘to make, to do or to create’. Ma’aseh describes ‘labour and behaviour’. God shows His love by His mighty acts for people.
The Greek word ergon means ‘employment or task’. Ergasia means ‘a work, a business or a performance’. The verb ergazomai means ‘to earn by working’, and katergazomai means ‘to achieve by toil’.
Do you show love by your work?
God places these words in the Bible so that we
Christians will learn how to work as worship.
Work is not separate from our worship. It is a vital part of it.