Work Seminar

(Questions - ask this at the start, and again at the end, to see change in answers:

How do you feel about work?

Hate it, dread it

Love it

Exhausting

Apathetic - accept as just part of everyday life

What does work mean to you?

Means to an end - You just work so you can have a job, make enough money, so that you can now really enjoy what life is truly about (eg, family, rest, travelling, other interests or hobbies, recreation/fun). The true end goal is something else in life, and work is just a means to get there.

Work is everything - job, success, money, gives me security, identity, meaning in life.

What difference does our faith make in our work? How does our faith actually play out in our jobs?

?Being nice and being a ‘good’ person

?Being very skilled and better than everyone else at work

?Telling others about the gospel and making it obvious that you’re a Christian

?Further social justice

?To be grateful and joyful no matter what difficulties you face

?Make as much money as you can so you can be generous towards others and the church

Explain main purpose of today:

Why is it important to talk about work as a Christian?

Work takes up a lot of our time in life!

Work is hard - can really take a big toll on our lives

Stressful

Conflict

Productivity is rarely as we would like

Hard to know what it means to be a ‘Christian’ at work. There’s often a disconnect between our faith and our beliefs, and when we actually do our day-to-day work in the secular workplace.

Today we will take a Biblical theological approach to work and try to answer the above questions: why is work so hard? Are we meant to work a lot? What meaning is work meant to have in our lives? What does it mean to be a ‘Christian’ at work?

Brief explanation of what biblical theology is. Key unfolding developments in the Bible:

Creation

Fall

Redemption

(New creation)

Apply it to work, what it means for us, and how it practically applies to our work today.

Creation

In the opening chapters of Genesis in the creation narratives, we can see God’s original design for work.

Our work Is God’s work

Work is so important in the Bible, that pretty much as soon as the Bible begins, it talks about work.

We are created and designed to work. Start of Genesis shows us that God creates, ie, God works. And as a God who works, he created Adam and Eve and placed them in the garden to work as well, to take care of God’s good creation. He created us to work. We are created and designed to work.

Providence - through us. In fact, God continues to work. He has never stopped working, because the fact that the world is still existing right now is because of God’s work.

Hebrews 1:3 “3 He is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature, and he upholds the universe by the word of his power. After making purification for sins, he sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high,”

Everything in creation is cared for and sustained by the work of God, every single second. Without God’s work, all of creation would not exist.

And one of the ways that God sustains and cares for creation, is that He works through us. Read Psalm 127:1 “1 Unless the Lord builds the house, those who build it labor in vain. Unless the Lord watches over the city, the watchman stays awake in vain.”

This verse implies that it is God building the house, and the way He builds the house, is through us. That means our work, is God’s work, working through us.

When we work, we are directly participating in God’s loving, caring, sustaining work of all creation.

Have you ever thought about work in this way? Your work is not just for money, or just for your purpose or self-worth. Your work has great value and worth, because no matter what your work is, it is God working through you to sustain and take care of His creation.

The Bible has a very high and exalted view of work. Work is not just the mundane day-to-day activity of life.

Work Is good

Part of blessing of creation. Work was part of paradise, in the garden of Eden. God saw that all of creation was ‘good’, and therefore, our work is good also. Work is part of God’s blessings towards creation.

We often see work as a bad thing, as a necessary evil. Work is not a bad thing that entered into creation later - it was right there from the start, work was built into the very fabric of creation, work is part of our original design.

Work is just as important to us as food, water, relationship, or any other human need.

We can work a lot. In fact, work is such a foundational part of us, that if we look at the Bible, we’re meant to do a lot of it.

Ratio of work is 6:1 in the Genesis account!

In our minds, we often think of the opposite: we want to work less, and rest/play more. But the Bible tells us that it’s the opposite - the balance between work and rest, leans heavily towards work.

For many people, not working for a long time, can lead to a great sense of meaninglessness and hopelessness in our lives.

Too much rest/pleasurable things/enjoyment is usually bad - hedonism, addiction, laziness.

So as Dorothy Sayers puts it, the Christian understanding of work is that it is ‘not primarily a thing one does to live, but the thing one lives to do. It is, or it should be, the full expression of the worker’s faculties...the medium in which he offers himself to God.’

‘일은 보는 기독교적인 관점은 무엇인가? 무엇보다 살기 위해 일해야 하는 게 아니라 일하기 위해 살아야 한다는 것이다. 일하는 이의 능력을 최대로 표현하는 게 곧 자신을 하나님께 드리는 수단이며 반드시 그리되어야 한다.’

Dorothy Sayers quote. Page 38 in English book.

Our Work Is Limited

God intentionally limits his own work. He creates for 6 days, and then he rests for 1 day. God doesn’t necessarily need rest, because God doesn’t get tired, but he still rests for 1 day.

God also tells us to work for 6 days, and commands us to observe the Sabbath and rest on the Sabbath day - Exodus 20:8–11 “8 “Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. 9 Six days you shall labor, and do all your work, 10 but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God. On it you shall not do any work, you, or your son, or your daughter, your male servant, or your female servant, or your livestock, or the sojourner who is within your gates. 11 For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.”

God intentionally limiting his own work, and our work tells us a few things about work:

We are created to work, but rest is also important. Rest helps us recover.

Rest helps us to enjoy creation and the fruit of our labours.

But most importantly, the Sabbath rest reminds us that God is ultimately at the center of life.

When the 10 commandments were originally given, working 7 days a week would have been really important - farming, preparing for war. It would have been highly advantageous to work 7 days, especially when you have enemy countries around you, and you need food for survival.

But God intentionally tells the Israelites to not work on the 7th. The Sabbath rest is a reminder that God is the center of everything, that God is in control of everything, and that we are completely dependent on God. Forcibly stopping us from working, stops us from becoming dependent on our own work, and stops us from living under the illusion that our lives are under our control by our works.

And this is really important, because even we can become dependent on work. Not so much these days dependent on work for food or survival (although that’s still the case for some people), but our idolatrous hearts use work for our own validation, affirmation, self-esteem, meaning in life.

The Sabbath rest is our declaration that our relationship with God is the most important foundation of our lives.

Our Work Has Dignity (존엄한 가치가 있다)

An important teaching about work in the Genesis creation account is that our work has dignity.

We are all created in the image of God. Read Genesis 1:27 “27 So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.” Within all of creation, only humans are special in that they are created in God’s image.

And out of all creation, only humans are given a specific job/work to do - read Genesis 1:28 “28 And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.””

To ‘subdue’ or ‘have dominion’ over creation, is not to tyranically rule over creation, but it is God placing us to rule over the earth in his place. We are exercising stewardship over the rest of creation, we are vice-regents of God.

Our work therefore has dignity because the work that we do, is something that God does, and we are doing it in God’s place, as His representatives.

This is important because that means all human work has this dignity. And there’s a really important application point for this:

We often don’t realise how much of the way we think, is not our own independent thoughts, but has been shaped by history, and the prevailing philosphical thoughts around us.

In ancient Greek philosophy there was a strong material-spiritual divide, where they regarded the spiritual as good, and the material as bad. That’s why the Greeks thought work was a bad thing, because work results in us being involved in the physical/material realm.

Aristotle thought that being unemployed was the way to live a genuinely worthwhile life.

Plato thought that the body and things related to the physical body, including work, is a hindrance to true purpose of life of our spirit reaching towards the truth - Plato actually saw death as a friend. The ancient Greek philosophers aimed to be least involved in the material world as much as possible.

This meant that the ancient Greeks saw work, especially physical manual labour, as something that is devaluaing, demeaning, something that relegates us to the animal level. They valued intellectual work, philosophical work, things that did not involve them in material things.

And even though these philosophies are from thousands of years ago, little do we realise how much they still affect us today.

Even today, people respect the intellectual classes of jobs much more than the physical/manual labour jobs. We often look down upon jobs in manual labour, and respect/value them less. The white collar vs. blue collar jobs.

This means that those who are able to in society, they pursue jobs of the intellectual class, the jobs we call ‘professionals’. The classic lawyers, doctors, engineers, accountants, etc.

This may be the case even if someone is not gifted in those areas. Maybe someone is genuinely gifted to work in a manual labour job, but they abandon it to pursue a more respected intellectual job, even though they are not suited for it.

But the Bible has a completely different view. The Bible doesn’t have this material-physical divide. When God created all things, he called all of the material creation ‘good’ - read Genesis 1:31 “31 And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day.”

‘Everything’ was good. Not just the spiritual, but also the physical.

Even our resurrection, we often misunderstand as something purely spiritual, as if we will become floating disembodied spirits after we die. The Bible actually talks about how our bodies will become resurrected in the future. Not just spirit.

Even the concept of heaven, is not some spiritual plane, but the Bible talks about heaven, as something physical. It uses language such as the ‘new heavens and the new earth’; Revelation 21 talks about a ‘new Jerusalem’ coming down from heaven.

The Bible affirms the goodness of the physical, material creation.

That means all our work as value, meaning, and dignity. Not just the intellectual class of jobs, but also the physical. A job as a cleaner, a tradie, a farmer, is no less valued in the eyes of God, than a lawyer, doctor, or engineer. And where is this most obvious? In the very work of God himself:

In the OT, God is a gardner

In the NT, God is a carpenter

Even Paul the Apostle, was a tentmaker. Peter was a fisherman.

All work, including the physical, has dignity, and is valuable. This is because we are made in the image of God, and the work we do, is actually God using us to care for His creation. This has a few important application points:

There is no basis for having superiority or jealously for other kinds of jobs.

We are now free to pursue to seek the kind of jobs and work that suits our gifts and passions. We no longer need to be controlled by the values of society.

We can all work with the conviction that whatever work we do, we are participating in God’s creative work in the world, and God’s caring for his creation.

Work is a Calling, Service, & Love

We are cheating a bit because we are moving out of Genesis and moving into the NT, but the Bible teaches us about the purpose of our work. Work is something that God calls us to do, to serve.

Read 1 Corinthians 7:17 “17 Only let each person lead the life that the Lord has assigned to him, and to which God has called him. This is my rule in all the churches.”

In this section of 1 Corinthians 7, Paul teaches that when we become Christians, we don’t need to dramatically change our lives. We don’t need to dramatically change our marriage or jobs or our situation, but Paul　tells us that we are to ‘lead the life that the LORD has assigned to him and to which God has called him.’

Our lives, including our work, is something that God has assigned to us, and something which God has called us to. We often think within just the nucleus of our own lives, and we don’t necessarily see the bigger picture of how our work is something God has assigned to us and called us to. There is a grander bigger picture to work.

But we also need to look at the use of these two words elsewhere:

Read 1 Corinthians 1:9 “9 God is faithful, by whom you were called into the fellowship of his Son, Jesus Christ our Lord.”

When God calls us, He is not only calling us individually, but He is calling us into the fellowship. Into a community.

Read Romans 12:3 “3 For by the grace given to me I say to everyone among you not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think, but to think with sober judgment, each according to the measure of faith that God has assigned.”

In this passage in Romans, Paul talks about the gifts that God has assigned to believers, to be used for the bigger community of Christians.

So the whole purpose of our work - to which we are assigned and called - is not just for ourselves, but is for the greater community, not just the church community, but for the wider secular community as well. The whole point of work is for service of others: serving God, and serving our neighbour.

This is so different to modern conceptions of work. Modern secular societal values are:

Complete autonomy: the complete freedom and power to choose for ourselves, complete independence from others. But the Bible teaches us that our work cannot be separated from others and the wider community - the entire purpose of our work is for the benefit of others.

Self-fulfillment: we see work as a way to fulfill ourselves, our purpose, our destinies. But the Bible teaches that work is not for the fulfillment of ourselves, but others.

This means that work is ultimately an act of love. All work, under God, has a common and exalted purpose: to love God and love our neighbour. Work is one of the ways we can fulfill the great commandment of Jesus who summarised the law as loving God and loving your neighbour.

This is a radical change in our understanding of work. It is so hard to get out of the mindset of work being just to make money, or just a means to enjoy something else in life.

It means all jobs, not just the ‘helping’ jobs (nursing, doctors, social workers, etc), are ways of obeying God and loving God and loving our neighbour. All work is participating in God’s taking care of the world, and all work is serving God and serving others.

This helps us connect our Sunday, with the rest of the week. Sunday can feel ‘spiritual’, but then it’s really hard to make that connection between our secular work and us being Christian. But the Bible teaches us that even our so-called ‘secular’ work is actually spiritual, because we have been assigned, called, to our work; and our work itself is an act of obedience to God to love Him and our neighbour.

So when we conscious of the fact that our work is a calling and is an act of obedience and love, it will give us true meaning and fulfillment from our work - we get fulfillment not from the work itself, but because work becomes an act of worship to God. No matter what kind of work it is.

Fall

But when we actually work, our experiences of work don’t actually reflect God’s original design for work. And that’s because as a result of the fall and sin, we see the original design for work starts to fall apart.

Work becomes fruitless

Read Genesis 3:17–19 “17 And to Adam he said, “Because you have listened to the voice of your wife and have eaten of the tree of which I commanded you, ‘You shall not eat of it,’ cursed is the ground because of you; in pain you shall eat of it all the days of your life; 18 thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you; and you shall eat the plants of the field. 19 By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread, till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; for you are dust, and to dust you shall return.””

The experience of our work is often:

Frustration - Our work is often filled with failures, barriers, fatigue, conflict, envy.

Fruitlessness. We will always be able to envision our work to be far greater than what we can actually achieve. We work hard, but the fruit of our work is often little, or often nothing at all. And this is because of both our inability and also our environment around us resisting our work.

And this is because of sin. We see in the book of Genesis, sin comes into the world, and starts to ruin all of creation. The effects of sin are comprehensive across all of creation, and it affects every area of our lives - and one of the biggest areas that sin affects, is work.

Good quote from Keller’s book (pg 89): ‘Do you find the two great tasks in life - love and work - to be excruciatingly hard? [Sin] explains why. God ties the pain of love and marriage and the pain of work very closely together in these verses. Both childbearing and farming are now called “painful labour.”’

‘사랑과 일이라는 인생의 두 가지 커다란 책부를 다하는 게 극심하게 힘든가? [죄가] 그 이유다...하나님은 사랑과 결혼의 아픔과 일의 수고로움을 이 구절과 긴밀하게 연결시키신다. 이제 출산과 경작은 고통스러운 노동이라 불리게 되었다.’

And we must remember that it is not work itself that is a curse, but it is the curse of sin that has affected all of life, including our work. Work is inherently good, but it has come under a curse.

Practical implications:

It protects Christians from being idealists (이상주의). When we face fruitlessness & frustration in our work, we should not be surprised. In fact, we should expect it. Although we are saved Christians, we still operate in a world under the curse of sin.

This means just because you face failure or work, or you don’t achieve your highest aspirations, it doesn’t mean that you have chosen the wrong profession, it doesn’t mean that God has not called you to that line of work. There is no such thing as a perfect career, with no frustration, with no fruitlessness. So even though you are in the exactly right job for you, you should still expect failure and frustration.

But it also protects Christians from cynicism (냉소주의). Work will still produce some fruit. It won’t be completely fruitless. Work will always ben both fruitless and frustrated.

And even though we won’t produce the perfect fruit through our work like God originally had designed, through the partial fruit we produce today, we can get a glimpse into the perfect work that God originally designed, that we will be able to experience in the new heavens and new earth when Christ returns.

So even though there are thorns in our work today, Christians are never ultimately discouraged, because we have the ultimate hope in the future.

Work becomes meaningless

Because of the fall, work not only becomes fruitless, but also meaningless.

We fail to experience lasting true satisfaction or fulfillment from our work. Even if our work produces fruit.

We can turn to the book of Ecclesiastes to get a better understanding of this.

Explain book of Ecclesiastes.

In Ecclesiastes, one of the leading questions is Ecclesiastes 1:3 “3 What does man gain by all the toil at which he toils under the sun?”. Solomon is grappling with all the work he’s done in his life and all his achievements, and he is desperately asking the question, what was the point of all of this? Was there any meaning?

And Solomon’s answer is, everything is meaningless. Work and all his achievements was completely pointless.

Vanity frame - see Ecclesiastes 1:2 “2 Vanity of vanities, says the Preacher, vanity of vanities! All is vanity.” & Ecclesiastes 12:8 “8 Vanity of vanities, says the Preacher; all is vanity.”

This phrase is repeated, and it frames the entire book. By creating this frame, Solomon is showing the comprehensive reality of vanity in this world that is under the curse of sin. Everything in life is pervaded by vanity, nothing escapes it. It is not that it ‘seems’ like its meaningless but you can find true meaning, it truly is meaningless and pointless.

Some reasons for vanity that Solomon lists:

Impermanence and powerlessness of human achievements - Ecclesiastes 1:4–11 “4 A generation goes, and a generation comes, but the earth remains forever. 5 The sun rises, and the sun goes down, and hastens to the place where it rises. 6 The wind blows to the south and goes around to the north; around and around goes the wind, and on its circuits the wind returns. 7 All streams run to the sea, but the sea is not full; to the place where the streams flow, there they flow again. 8 All things are full of weariness; a man cannot utter it; the eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing. 9 What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun. 10 Is there a thing of which it is said, “See, this is new”? It has been already in the ages before us. 11 There is no remembrance of former things, nor will there be any remembrance of later things yet to be among those who come after.”

Verses 4-7 talks about the circularity of life. We work hard, and we are busy in life, but ultimately, there is no net change in the world.

Verses 9-10 talks about how we are unable to escape this reality.

Verse 11 talks about how nothing we do will be permanent, and will be forgotten.

Fruitlessness

Ecclesiastes 2:21 “21 because sometimes a person who has toiled with wisdom and knowledge and skill must leave everything to be enjoyed by someone who did not toil for it. This also is vanity and a great evil.”　

Even if you produce fruit, you might not even be able to enjoy it, and it is just given to someone else.

Ecclesiastes 5:10 “10 He who loves money will not be satisfied with money, nor he who loves wealth with his income; this also is vanity.”

Even if you produce fruit and wealth, it doesn’t produce satisfaction because it’s never enough

Ecclesiastes 5:11 “11 When goods increase, they increase who eat them, and what advantage has their owner but to see them with his eyes?”

Even if you produce fruit and greater wealth, it comes with greater burdens.

Ecclesiastes 2:23 “23 For all his days are full of sorrow, and his work is a vexation. Even in the night his heart does not rest. This also is vanity.”

Work doesn’t bring the satisfaction and happiness that you expect, and rather it brings sorrow and vexation.

Ecclesiastes 6:3 “3 If a man fathers a hundred children and lives many years, so that the days of his years are many, but his soul is not satisfied with life’s good things, and he also has no burial, I say that a stillborn child is better off than he.”

Solomon is so frustrated about this reality that he says ‘a stillborn child is better off than he.’

Death

Ecclesiastes 2:14–16 “14 The wise person has his eyes in his head, but the fool walks in darkness. And yet I perceived that the same event happens to all of them. 15 Then I said in my heart, “What happens to the fool will happen to me also. Why then have I been so very wise?” And I said in my heart that this also is vanity. 16 For of the wise as of the fool there is no enduring remembrance, seeing that in the days to come all will have been long forgotten. How the wise dies just like the fool!”

Death makes everything impermanent - including wisdom, wealth, work. This makes work pointless.

So with all this, Solomon says this really devastating verse - Ecclesiastes 2:17 “17 So I hated life, because what is done under the sun was grievous to me, for all is vanity and a striving after wind.”

It is a complete and comprehensive judgement on the pointlessness, and meaninglessness of work.

But there is an important phrase that is constantly repeated in Ecclesiates. And that is the phrase ‘under the sun’ - Ecclesiastes 1:3 “3 What does man gain by all the toil at which he toils under the sun?”

What ‘under the sun’ refers to is work that is done in this world divorced from any greater or eternal reality. It is work that is done apart from God. It is work that is done independently and autonomously, without any acknowledgement and dependence on God.

It is this kind of work that is judged as meaningless.

Then what about work that is done under the reality and dependence on God?

This is how the book of Ecclesiastes concludes - read Ecclesiastes 12:13–14 “13 The end of the matter; all has been heard. Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man. 14 For God will bring every deed into judgment, with every secret thing, whether good or evil.”

The conclusion of the book is to fear God.

When we live all of life, including our work, fearing God, acknowledging God, depending on God, then even the smallest things become changed from meaninglessness to an abundance of meaning.

Read Ecclesiastes 2:24–26 “24 There is nothing better for a person than that he should eat and drink and find enjoyment in his toil. This also, I saw, is from the hand of God, 25 for apart from him who can eat or who can have enjoyment? 26 For to the one who pleases him God has given wisdom and knowledge and joy, but to the sinner he has given the business of gathering and collecting, only to give to one who pleases God. This also is vanity and a striving after wind.”

There are a few ‘enjoyment refrains’ like this in Ecclesiastes. And this is not written in a resigned tone, as if its saying ‘if everything in life is meaningless anyway, then we may as well just enjoy it.’ It is saying that while independent human striving is completely meaningless and vanity, when something is given by ‘the hand of God’ then it is meaningful. This means that God can make even the small ordinary things in life, like eating and drinking, full of meaning. But without God, even the greatest things in life, become meaningless.

So therefore, only a life lived before God, and only work done before God, can be true meaningful work.

But how God makes our work meaningful is not explained in Ecclesiastes. So Ecclesiastes doesn’t provide the full answer, and it points beyond itself. It needs the NT, and ultimately Jesus Christ, to complete the message.

Work becomes selfish

Another effect of the fall on work, is that work becomes selfish.

We talked about how work is meant to be partaking in God’s work of caring for his creation, and it is a way we can obey the command to love God and love others. Work is inherently not mean to be self-centred, but completely other-person centred.

But sin makes our approach to work completely self-centred.

This is clearly seen in the Tower of Babel account. We won’t go through the whole story, but there is a key verse here - read Genesis 11:4 “4 Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be dispersed over the face of the whole earth.””

‘Let us make a name for ourselves’ - work no longer becomes service to others, but a way to make ourselves greater, more important. A way to increase our self-worth and self esteem. To glorify ourselves and to make ourselves more powerful. We are drawing our identity from our work, rather than God.

‘lest we be dispersed over the face of the whole earth’ - work becomes a way for us save ourselves from meaninglessness, insecurity, lack of self-worth. But we are seeking things from work that can only be found from God.

And the consequences of work becoming self-centred to other-person centred is significant, as it leads to:

Competition - there can be good competition that drives innovation, but competition is this world is usually a self-centred motive, seeking to elevate yourself and destroy others.

Disunity - we no longer work together for a common good, but we only work for our own interests. This leads to conflict, gossip, lack of harmony in the workplace, rather than unity.

So the result is that self-centred work makes it impossible to follow the original design of work, which is completely other-person centred: loving God and loving others.

Redemption

So we have seen the original design of work in creation, but we have also seen how it has been ruined by the fall and sin.

So how does the gospel change and redeem our work?

We have a new story for work

We may not know it, but we all live our lives according to a certain story or narrative. And we can call the story or narrative we live in our worldview.

For example, for a non-Christian, if they have a evolutionary and purely scientific understanding of the world, then ultimately there is no greater meaning in life. We are no different to other plants and animals. We are just clusters of cells that are born, and then disappear, with no meaning or significance. With this kind of worldview, life ultimately has no greater meaning or significance, and then life just becomes about finding enjoyment while we are alive, finding our own personal meaning and fulfillment since there is no greater meaning to life. Work, then just becomes either (1) a necessary evil, to make money, so that you can enjoy other things in life, or (2) work becomes the means of self-fulfillment and giving you a sense of self-importance.

So we can see how worldview is important because it shapes the very way of how we understand our work.

So then what is the Christian worldview and how does it shape our understanding of work?

It’s exactly what we have been talking about in this seminar. The Christian worldview is creation-fall-redemption. This is now how we view our work:

We get a new understanding of how work is meant to be, in it’s original design in creation. While the world might view work as something evil or annoying, Christians view work as something inherently good, as part of God’s original good design. And work is a way we can love God and love our neighbour, and it is a way to serve others.

We get a new understanding of why work feels bad in our lives. It’s not that work is inherently bad, but it’s because of sin, an external foreign thing that has ruined God’s original creation design. So when we experience the badness of work in our everyday lives, we have a bigger picture understanding of why.

We have a new understanding of how God will restore work, redeem work. Just as God saves us, He will also restore all creation, including work, in the new heavens and the new earth. And we will talk more about this in later points.

So being a Christian at work is not just about telling others about the gospel, or being a nice person, or being good at your job, or adding bible verses to your projects. It is also about gaining a whole new set of lenses to view your work, from a gospel perspective: from the perspective of creation, fall, redemption. It is being able to view your work from the Bible’s perspective, being able to view your work through the things we have already been talking about this seminar.

And this new worldview we have, will influence how we think, speak, and behave. It helps us see everything in a new light.

Example: myself & medicine

Medicine has temptations of:

Personal pride and idolatry in medicine. The respect you get from the title of being a ‘doctor’. See yourself as better than others, see your jobs as superior to other professions.

Cynicism about life and people (냉소주의 & 허무주의) - through seeing constant death and suffering, tiring long hours, and meeting lots of ungrateful patients -> become emotionally hardened and detached from everything, and cynical about people and suffering/death

But the new story that the gospel gives me, helps me correct these things.

God called all work good, so there is no reason for me to see my job as any better or superior than any other job. We are all God’s servants, partaking in God’s work, in loving God and loving our neighbours.

Even though work has a lot of death, disappointment in people, I know that the problem is not the work itself, or the people, but the problem is something external: sin. So rather than hate the failures I see in work and the people at work, I direct my hate towards sin itself.

And I always have a greater hope in the future when God will finally restore everything, and there will be no more death.

I can now work with hope, rather than cynicism and detachment. And this makes makes me a better doctor, because I no longer have to emotionally detach myself from my patients out of fear of hurt.

We have a new conception of work

We have already touched on this from the original design of work in creation.

Remember, we talked about how God has never stopped working, sustaining and taking care of his creation. If God stopped working for even 1 second, creation would no longer exist.

We also talked about how one of the ways God works to take care of his creation, is through us and our work. So when we work, we are taking part in God’s great loving work of taking care of the world.

But God doesn’t only use Christians and their work. God doesn’t only give gifts and talents to Christians, but he also gives gifts and talents to non-Christians as well. God uses the work of non-believers to take care of his creation. And this is because all human beings are made in the image of God.

So this explains why non-Christians can produce wonderful and good work in the world too. And very often, non-Christians produce actually better work that Christians!

So as Christians, we have no reason to be elitist about our work. We shouldn’t undervalue the work of non-believers. God uses the work of everyone for his good purposes.

So Christians should place high value on all human work, done by all people, as a way God lovingly takes care of the world.

For the Christian, our enemy is not non-Christians, but sin itself.

So what does this practically mean for us?

This means as Christians, we can engage with the secular world for work. So this means we can work cooperatively and respectively and humbly with non-Christians to produce good work in this world.

We don’t need to withdraw from the world like monks. We also don’t need to forcibly try and insert the name of Jesus Christ into every single little thing we do at work. It is possible to integrate into secular work as Christians. God works through all good work, not only the work that is overtly done in Jesus name.

And this new conception of work helps us bridge that gap between our Sunday and the work week.

We often think of Sundays at church as our Christian life, because things are done obviously in the name of Jesus. But with our new understanding of work, we know that even in the secular world, we are doing God’s work.

Furthermore, being mindful that even our secular work is actually religious, spiritual, as God’s work, helps us to be more mindful about how we see and absorb things at our workplace. If we are not mindful of our secular work actually being part of our Christian lives, then we might blindly follow and accept all the values and idols of our secular work. We will be too integrated, and lose our distinctiveness. The bad things of the world that we do need to separate from our lives we will just mindlessly absorb, and we will not be able to see how the gospel reframes everything about our work.

We have a new compass for work

We have talked a lot about how Christians share a lot in common with non-believers at work.

But Christians are also very distinct from non-believers. And we stand out from non-believers, because Christians have a new compass for work - a new direction for our work.

The first way we have a new direction for our work is we have a new work ethic:

And the key principle of the Christian ethic is love.

Our God is Trinity, and therefore, naturally our God is a relational God, a God of love. Even the great commandment he gives us is love our God, and love our neighbour. The Christian love ethic is actually quite radical, because Jesus commands us to love our enemies as well. And this ethic should flow into our work as well.

Love should be the controlling principle in our work ethic. Everything else becomes secondary, including our identities, our accomplishments, our career progression, our finances.

And the nature of Christian love is sacrificial, just as Jesus showed us on the cross.

So Christians must always be thinking about how our work can be more beneficial to others.

This can often make us stand out, because this may have certain practical implications:

It may mean you will sacrifice financial gain and opportunities to show love

It may mean you will sacrifice reputation to show love to others

It may mean you oppose certain practices at your work because it is unloving.

The second way we have new direction for our work is we have wisdom:

Keller provides a really helpful definition of wisdom. When we think about how to live the Christian life, we often think about the morals/ethics the Bible teaches to guide us on how to live. Things like do not murder, do not steal, love your neighbour, etc.

But life involves so many other things than these moral/ethical decisions. Probably these moral/ethical guidelines do not impact most of your day-to-day decisions. Things like, how to do your job interview, what job to take, whether to carry out a business deal, etc.

This is where the biblical category of wisdom fits in. Wisdom is about how to live well, especially when the moral/ethical principles of the Bible don’t clearly apply.

So how do we get wisdom from God?

The OT has a lot of wisdom books. And these are all incredibly helpful. The OT teaches us what wisdom is. But it is the NT that gives us the power to actually live with wisdom. And that is because we need Jesus Christ, our ultimate wisdom.

We gain wisdom when the gospel of Jesus Christ becomes a transforming reality in our lives. When the gospel, the love of God in Jesus Christ, is not just ideas in our head, but a living reality, our hearts and our minds are controlled less by sinful things like anxiety, or pride. And rather, the Holy Spirit transforms us, giving us the clarity, the humility, the confidence, the knowledge, and the character we need to live wise lives.

The third way we have a new direction for our work is we have a new audience:

Read Ephesians 6:5–9 “5 Bondservants, obey your earthly masters with fear and trembling, with a sincere heart, as you would Christ, 6 not by the way of eye-service, as people-pleasers, but as bondservants of Christ, doing the will of God from the heart, 7 rendering service with a good will as to the Lord and not to man, 8 knowing that whatever good anyone does, this he will receive back from the Lord, whether he is a bondservant or is free. 9 Masters, do the same to them, and stop your threatening, knowing that he who is both their Master and yours is in heaven, and that there is no partiality with him.”

In this passage, Paul is addressing slaves and their masters. And he says a surprising thing to them: he tells them that all their work should be done as though they were serving God.

Every verse in this passage, has either the word ‘Christ’ or ‘LORD’, indicating that even within our earthly realities of slave/master, or maybe in our case employer/employee, the true LORD and master is the ascended Jesus Christ in heaven. And He is our ultimate master. He is our true audience. It is His opinion that matters most.

This means we must work with ‘sincere hearts’ - single minded, with focus, integrity, honesty, rather than being deceptive and sly.

We work primarily to please God. God’s opinion will be the main thing controlling us, not the opinions of man.

This will help us be free from overwork, as we will not be so desperate to please our earthly masters.

And this will help us be free from underwork, as if we are not that interested in pleasing our earthly masters leading to underwork, we will most certainly be interested in pleasing our heavenly master.

We can work with true joy, because we know we work for a good God, who will reward us in heaven.

We can be freedom in our work because if there is a collision between earthly vs. Christian values, we obey our heavenly master, rather than earthly values and rules.

We have a new power for work

Finally, in the gospel of Jesus Christ, we have a new power for our work.

First, we have new power because we have freedom.

Often, our work has a lot of baggage (짐). For many of us, work is not just a gift from God, but has many things attached to it.

Work becomes a way to try and save ourselves - we try to build our worth, security, and meaning through work.

Or work is just a necessary evil to enjoy ‘real life’

But Jesus gives us new power to work, free from all this baggage, all the wrong motivations, because Jesus fundamentally changes our relationship to work. Jesus is the one who gives true meaning and value to us. Only in Jesus is true life and true enjoyment. We now have security and identity and life, that is not attached to work.

We are no longer controlled by our work. Christ breaks us free from the idols of our work that controls us, so that now we can be controlled by Christ.

Second, we also have new power of true passion.

As we just said, we are often controlled by the idols of our work. We work hard to make ourselves greater, or get ahead of someone else, or to prove ourselves, or just for hedonism and pure enjoyment. But these are wrong passions.

The gospel of Jesus Christ gives us the true passion to help us work hard, and passionately. And the true passion that Christ gives us, is self-sacrifice.

Read Romans 12:1 “1 I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.”

Paul here urges believers to live as ‘living sacrifices’. This is paradoxical, because sacrifices by definition are dead, so how can they be living? But what Paul is saying is to live and work as a Christian is to continually die to your own interests and live for the interests of God and others.

And this sounds impossible. So where do we get this passion from? In the verse, it says ‘by the mercies of God’, and the ultimate mercy was the sacrifice of Jesus himself. We get this new passion for work from Jesus Christ himself. The more we realise and experience Jesus’ sacrifice for us, the more we are able to work sacrificially for others.

Lastly, we have the new power of deep rest.

Read Matthew 11:28–30 “28 Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. 29 Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. 30 For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.””

Work, and life, can be tiresome and burdensome. But Jesus says something strange here - he says the solution to our tiredness, is another burden or yoke. How can this be a solution?

That’s because the burden and yoke is his burden and yoke. It’s something that He has carried and accomplished, and it’s the only burden that’s light for us. And this very burden that Jesus has carried is all the work He has done and completed. So Jesus asks us to rest in His finished work. Resting in the finished work of Christ, is humbly accepting the sacrifice and salvation that Jesus has achieved on the cross. And when we accept the salvation that Jesus offers, we can truly rest in the identity, security, and peace that God gives us, and no longer are we burdened and yoked to the things of the world that we try and get identity and security from.

So when we truly rest in the finished work of Christ, we will no longer work to fight a sense of insignificance about ourselves, or work to try and gain security for ourselves, but we can truly work for God, and truly enjoy work as God intended, and be truly satisfied with the work that we do.

Conclusion

Summary statement from page 241 of the book:

‘In the Christian view, the way to find your calling is to look at the way you were created. Your gifts have not emerged by accident, but because the Creator gave them to you. But what if you’re not at the point of running in the Olympics or leading on a world stage? What if you’re struggling under an unfair boss or a tedious job that doesn’t take advantage of all your gifts? It’s liberating to accept that God is fully aware of where you are at any moment and that by serving the work you’ve been given you are serving him… When your heart comes to hope in Christ and the future world he has guaranteed - when you are carrying his easy yoke - you finally have the power to work with a free heart. You can accept gladly whatever level of success and accomplishment God gives you in your vocation, because he has called you to it. You can work with passion and rest, knowing that ultimately the deepest desires of your heart - including your specific aspirations for your earthly work - will be fulfilled when you reach your true country, the new heavens and new earth. So in any time and place you can work with joy, satisfaction, and no regrets.’

‘크리스천의 관점으로 보자면, 스스로 어떻게 창조된 존재인지를 돌아보는 성찰이야말로 부르심을 찾는 가장 확실한 길이다. 은사는 우연의 소산이 아니며 창조주의 선물이기 때문이다. 하지만 올림필에 나가 트랙을 질주하거나 세계를 주름잡는 자리에 있지 않다면 어떻게 할 것인가? 부당한 요구를 일삼는 상사와 은사를 활용할 방도가 없는 지루한 일들에 시달린다면 어찌하겠느가? 지금 어떤 처지에 있는지 하나님이 정확히 알고 계시며 맡겨 주신 일을 충실히 해내는 게 주님을 섬기는 과정임을 인정하고 받아들인다면 현실에 얽매이지 않고 자유로워질수 있다… 그리스도, 그리고 주님이 보장해 주시는 미래 세계에 소망을 둔다면, 다시 말해 예수님의 쉬운 멍에를 멘다면, 자유로운 심령으로 일할 수 있는 힘을 얻는다. 크로 작음을 떠나 하나님이 일을 통해 주시는 성공과 성취를 있는 그대로 기쁘게 받아들일 수 있다. 그리고 부르신 이가 바로 주님이시리 때문이다. 가슴 깊은 곳에 담긴 영원한 소망(세상에서 일하며 품는 열망을 포함해서)은 그분의 나라가 이뤄지고 새 하늘과 새 땅이 열릴 때 온전히 채워진다는 걸 알고 있으므로, 열정을 품고 일할 수 있다. 그러기에 언제, 어디서나 기쁘고 만족스럽게, 유감없이 달릴 수 있다.’