What do you think about Work?

Do you work? What do you think about it, working? Even if we don’t have a regular job to go to we end up finding ourselves working. There is always something that needs to be done, if not in a regular job, then around the house, or at a neighbor’s house, or at church. 

The bottom line is that the Bible establishes the goodness of work early on in the book of Genesis. We can sum up that the very first thing that ever happened was “WORK!” Then by Genesis 2:1 we read this:

Thus the heavens and the earth were completed in all their vast array. By the seventh day God had finished the work he had been doing; so on the seventh day he rested from all his work. And God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it he rested from all the work of creating that he had done.” 

And what do we know about all this work? God said that it was… “good!"

As I was reading in Genesis it was amazing to me that from the very beginning God had a positive attitude. He had been working, and then He stepped back and said, “man that’s good!” Can you picture it? He was proud of what He had made, and his attitude reflected it! Coach Lou Holtz once said, "Ability is what you're capable of doing. Motivation determines what you do. Attitude determines how well you do it."

Paul wrote in Colossians 3: 23-24 “Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for men, since you know that you will receive an inheritance from the Lord as a reward. It is the Lord Christ you are serving.”

Work is inevitable. We are always going to work. There's no way around it. It is such a big part of our life people write songs about working. There's songs that talk about loving work and there's songs that talk about hating work. Our attitude towards that work is dependent upon our relationship with Christ. It is truly impossible to bear the fruit (attitudes) of the Spirit (Galatians 5:16-26) when we don't abide in Christ. John 15: 5 says, "I (Jesus) am the vine; you are the branches. If a man remains in me and I in him, he will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing." This includes having the kind of attitude we need and dare I say want to have.

Just for kicks, what's your favorite song about working? Mine is "It's 5 o'clock somewhere" by Alan Jackson.