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PROGRAM D-8436
If I asked you to define worship, what would you say? You might say that worship is a time when we meet together in our churches or elsewhere, where we sing songs of praise, when we listen to sermons or teachings, etc. Certainly those should be important times of worship for us as Christ-followers, but worshiping God should never be limited to times and locations. Rather, it should be a way of life for us. Everything in our daily lives should have the focus of worship.
Since this is Labor Day, I thought it appropriate to talk about work as worship. You may be rolling your eyes about now and thinking that I’ve taken this a bit too far. Work as worship? The two may not seem to go together in your mind—kind of like oil and water, they don’t mix. But if you trace back the history of work, you will find that from its beginning, work was God’s idea.
First, consider Genesis 1. It’s all about God working, and then resting after his work was accomplished. God works—therefore work must be holy and good. Since we are created in God’s image, work is part of who we are, too—how we were created by God. We were created to work.
Then in Genesis 2, God created Adam and right away gave him a job description—to work the garden and take care of it. Today you might call that a secular job, but it was a job given to Adam by God. How could that be secular? Our inclination to separate parts of our lives into sacred and secular categories is a non-biblical and mistaken idea.
Let me ask you this: How do you think of your job? Is it something you have to do to get by? Is it a necessary evil required for you to make money? Do you mentally separate your work—your job—into some secular category, or do you understand that, as one created in God’s image and now a follower of Christ, your work should be your calling and it should be done in an attitude of worship? I hope this is true for you.
The question is, how can work be worship? How can you and I incorporate worshiping God into our daily jobs, whatever they may be? What does this look like?