Continued from Part 1.

Work

Work is laboring well as an act of worship that glorifies God. Subsequently, the father who goes to work, the mother who stays home to care for her young children like the woman in Proverbs 31, and the student who heads off to school are each called by God to labor in their work. Each has sacred tasks that God has appointed for them to capture as opportunities to worship Him. For the first roughly thirty years of His life, Jesus worked a common laborer’s job as a carpenter. For the remaining roughly three years of His life, Jesus said He was about His Father’s work (John 4:34; 5:17, 36). Jesus’ ministry work included exhausting preaching, teaching, feeding, healing, traveling by foot, and more. Both the Old and New Testaments have much to say about work. For example:

• The LORD God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work… (Genesis 2:15)
• Six days shall work be done, but the seventh day is a Sabbath of solemn rest, holy to the LORD. (Exodus 31:15)
• In all toil there is profit, but mere talk tends only to poverty. (Proverbs 14:23)
• Whoever is slack in his work is a brother to him who destroys. (Proverbs 18:9)
• The desire of the sluggard kills him, for his hands refuse to labor. (Proverbs 21:25)
• So I saw that there is nothing better than that a man should rejoice in his work… (Ecclesiastes 3:22)
• Whatever you do, work heartily, as for the Lord and not for men, knowing that from the Lord you will receive the inheritance as your reward. You are serving the Lord Christ. (Colossians 3:23–24)
• If anyone is not willing to work, let him not eat. (2 Thessalonians 3:10)
• But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace toward me was not in vain. On the contrary, I worked harder than any of them, though it was not I, but the grace of God that is with me. (1 Corinthians 15:10)

The Scriptures are clear that God made us to work and that despite the curse which makes our work all the more difficult, it is good and honorable for us to labor as unto the Lord Jesus. Then, as we have examined, we can enjoy a restful Sabbath as God intends. Sadly, however, this sort of balanced lifestyle is sorely lacking in our culture.

Overwork

The advent of electricity has distanced us from the creation rhythms of day and night. It brought about a twenty-four-hour lifestyle that includes constant interruption by technology such as phones and BlackBerries, even on our Sabbath days. The result is that we are overworked; the average workweek grew from forty to fifty hours in the U.S. in the past twenty-five years. We now work more hours than any nation other than Japan, which works an equal number of hours. Furthermore, the proliferation of temporary jobs that lack security mean that people are less likely to take a day off or vacation. It is success that causes even more stress and a work load that pressures people not to take their Sabbath days or vacations. Timothy Egan reported this trend in a New York Times article on August 20, 2006: “at the start of the summer, 40 percent of consumers had no plans to take a vacation in the next six months, the lowest percentage recorded by the group in 28 years” (“Vacation? Americans are laying it to rest”). In another survey, 43 percent of respondents had no summer-vacation plans. Furthermore, roughly 25 percent of U.S. workers in the private sector do not get any paid vacation time while 33 percent will take only a seven-day vacation, including a weekend. A spokesman for AAA said, “It's kind of sad, really, that people can't seem to leave their jobs anymore.” In fact, “the average American expects his or her longest summer trip to last six nights . . . [but] it takes three days just to begin to unwind, experts say.” Indeed, God in His loving wisdom instructs us to work and Sabbath equally well. If we fail to do so, we must ask ourselves what our god truly is and where our faith truly lies.