Worship and Work
This blog is the text of the video: WORSHIP AND WORK. To view the video, click HERE.
Some things, we know, just don’t go together. Square pegs don’t belong in round holes. Texting and driving don’t belong together. Combine them and you invite trouble on the highway. Grounded plugins and ungrounded outlets don’t belong together. The one just does not fit the other.
Then, there’s work and worship. But in the minds of many Christians, they just don’t belong together. So, they keep worship and work in separate drawers. They open the worship drawer on Sundays and the work drawer on weekdays. This way, worship and work remain safely tucked in their own compartments.
But here’s the problem with the two-drawer approach: it separates what God put together. God joined arms together with hands. It would make no sense whatever to separate the arm from the hand and put each in a separate drawer. Doing so would frustrate God’s purpose in making them.
Separating work from worship also frustrates his purpose. Doing so shrinks our idea of worship. In our thinking, it becomes smaller and smaller and smaller.
Here is how one blogger sees worship: “Worship to me has always meant the time that I spend at church every week for 30 minutes while music is being played.” In other words, worship gets reduced to what happens in the church building on Sundays . . . and further reduced to the few minutes of singing in that building.
All of life—including our work—should be full of worship. But what happens if we define worship as those minutes of singing on Sunday? Then worship gets squeezed into no more than a small corner of our lives.
This shrunken idea of worship drains work of the meaning God designed it to have. The work “drawer” remains empty of spiritual significance. Work, then, means nothing more than what it does in the world’s value system— gaining power, making money, producing necessities, and so on.
How can we reunite worship with life and with work? The answer lies in a Hebrew word that shows up in Genesis 2:15.
That word “work” translates the Hebrew word, “abad.” Abad occurs 289 times in the Hebrew Old Testament. Sometimes, it’s translated as “work” or “labor.” Other times, the same word gets translated as “worship” or “serve.” But why would the Bible use the same word for work and worship? How can those two belong together? The chasm between them is too wide.
But as we’ve seen, that same word, “abad,” also speaks of serving. Serving bridges the tradition-based gap between worship and work. To obey God by worshiping is to serve him. To obey God by working is to serve him. So worship is not about having warm and fuzzy feelings about God. Rather, worship can include both raising up our hands to honor him AND reaching out our hands to serve him through our work.
The Christian slaves in Colossae served in many of the working roles we 21st century people still recognize today: transportation, construction, food service, medicine, education, farming, manufacturing, mining, and so on. When Paul addressed them in his letter to the Colossian church, he said, “It is the Lord Christ you are serving.” By serving Christ in their work, they were worshiping.
Paul urged the Christians in Rome to “offer your bodies as living sacrifices.” Many of them were slaves. So their bodies would have spent the week working. But this offering of their bodies was, Paul said, their “spiritual worship.”
Visualize yourself at work. Think of how many parts of your body get involved in what you do. What if you drive bus? What parts of your body do you use? If you program computers, how does your body make that possible? If you care for patients, in what ways do rely on the parts of your body? If you fight fires, you depend on what body parts? If you run a school library, you call on what parts of your body in that role?
Take a moment to reflect on the ways your body makes it possible to do your own work. Think of your working body as a worship instrument.
But a major barrier stands in the way of turning our work into worship. That roadblock is self-worship. If we are using our work to inflate our own importance or self-esteem, we will find it impossible to offer it to God as worship. God’s remedy for self-worship is for us to recognize that not only did Jesus die for us but that we died with him. That old self-worshiping root in us cannot be cured or reformed. It must die. By faith, we take God at his word that this self-adoring part of us died with Jesus. Paul puts it this way: I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me.
The Christ living in you makes you able to offer your work to God as worship. As you go to work each day, learn to think of what you do as an offering. You hold your work, palm up, offering it up to God. Because you are doing it by means of your body, it becomes your ”spiritual worship.”
More on Work and Worship
Chapter 4 in GOD LOVES YOUR WORK explores the work-worship connection even further.
