Work and God

This title sounds good, but what does it mean? It seems to be ambiguous. Are we thinking of God at work in our lives or is it about God in our workplace?

Do we go to church to worship, to learn how God can work in our lives, or where He is in our place of work?

Many church services can include all three.

• We can go to church to worship God.
• We can learn about how God can be in our workplace.
• We can learn about God's work in our lives as we strive to become better people.

Quite a percentage of us do not go out from our homes to a workplace, we may work at home, we may be a stay at home parent, we may be seeking employment, we may be unable to be employed for some reason, or we may be retired.

If we do not go out to work,

• Is what we do still work?
• Is everything we do in our life work?
• When we volunteer in the community, is it work?

In other words, how do we view what we do?

When we worship God is it work?

After God had created the world and everything in it, we are told in the Bible that God rested. One of the Ten Commandments that God gave to His people through Moses, the Fourth Commandment, is about observing a day of rest. That is the day that we set aside to worship God in community, so when we worship God we are resting in Him and in fellowship with Him.

When we ask God to be with us in our workplace wherever that is, He will be with us. His Holy Spirit will guide us so that we always remember to act with honesty and integrity. However, we are human and not perfect; often there are events and people in our workplaces that make it difficult for us to be people of peace. Here, God's Son, Jesus, can be our Friend, beside us all day long. If we model our lives on Him and share God's love with those around us, it can greatly assist in our everyday interactions and lives.

No one knows exactly when Theologia Germanica was first written, but it could have been in the late fourteen hundreds, as Martin Luther published an edition of it in 1516. That's a long time ago, but it can still speak to us today. In it, the author covers a wide range of theological issues and one of them is that in order to attain goodness we must eradicate "I, Me, Mine and the like" from our lives and our thinking. This is an age old problem and it is very much to the forefront today with everything seeming to focus on the self, from 'selfies' to blatant selfishness. We deplore this in others and often fail to see it in ourselves. When we feel an inner motivation to strive to become better people it is God at work in our lives.

The unknown author of Theologia Germanica also wrote that every person who waits upon God experiences both hell and heaven. That reminds me of King David. I once had an acquaintance who was a psychologist. He held that David's expression of a person's descent into hell and being lifted up to heaven in the Psalms would today be diagnosed as manic-depression!

Not so. David expresses so well for us what we all seem to experience at crucial points in our lives when disasters occur and we find ourselves virtually in a living hell from which there is no escape. Then, if we allow God to work in our hearts, he will lift us up out of the mire so that we can have a taste of heaven. This lifting up is not our work, it is the work of the God the Holy Spirit as He uses such circumstances to teach us and then to lead us onto the right path.

God at work in our lives is not just for our own sakes but for the sake of others around us, so that we may be able to help them and that can be our privilege and our joy. It God's commission for us, but it is not our work, it is our service. By being obedient to God we serve Him, rather than work for Him. He is All-powerful and Almighty and can do His own work, our efforts are our service for Him. There really is a difference. When we serve God we sow the seed, but it is God who does the work and waters the seed, thus producing the fruit.

The work is God's.