Work

"Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for human masters." Colossians 3. 23

Work: what a topic for one's day off (if only!). But they say it's what most of us spend most of our time doing - under normal circumstances. Might there be something useful in considering the matter, precisely because we are in such abnormal circumstances that many are having to adjust to doing without the very thing that most absorbs us?

In the parent and toddler group in the previous church I served, there was a chorus we used to sing, which celebrated how creatures please God by being and doing what they were created to be and do: cows mooing, birds flying, fish swimming - you get the drift... But what about humans? What brings out the best in us: loving, praising - or working?

Perhaps all three. Certainly the Bible endorses love as the supreme commandment, the Shorter Catechism (based on the Bible) reminds us that "man's chief end is to glorify God and enjoy him forever". And in the opening chapters of the Bible God creates a beautiful garden and sets a creature made in his own image in the centre of it, with instructions to nurture it.

Even after the Fall, work remains the key purpose of humanity, albeit now by the sweat of our brows. But might one not argue that, with Jesus, the landscape has changed again: having paid the price for the Fall, has he not redeployed us for sacred service in the New Creation? We may not be there yet but if the Church's mission has to do with proclaiming the arrival of the Kingdom (with Jesus first coming) and its completion (at his coming again in glory), should we not be reflecting that in everything we are and do - including our work?

So, what would need to change about the way you work and indeed about the work that you do, in order that you could say whole-heartedly: "I am doing the Lord's work and I am doing it his way"?