Therefore, my beloved brothers, be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that in the Lord your labor is not in vain.

1 Corinthians 15: 58

 

Foe almost anyone who has held a job for any period of time the reality of frustration and discouragement with that work, the workplace, and the working conditions is well known. Although people can get a large amount of satisfaction from work, we also tend to enter into some of our most powerful disappointments there. For people who know what God has said to us, there is little surprise here. During the first hours of humanity’s new existence as people who had separated ourselves from the deep intimacy with God that He had devised, the Lord informed us that our work would be hard and unending and that the produce of that work would tend to be overgrown with the most noxious of weeds.

 

In this scenario our labor does provide us with purpose; however, we will also literally be working ourselves to death. Christ offers another alternative to His followers. Although He does not remove the natural struggle that envelopes our earthly labors as they are infused with the brokenness of sin, He does reshape our responses to it all. The Lord guides us into viewing our efforts as a part of His plan for redemption and for restoration. The work of our hands becomes a part of Christ’s grand narrative of a renewed existence for all of creation. This is made known by the manner in which we respond to and engage with the failure and the frustration of our daily employment regardless of what that may be.

 

In Christ, all that we do, say, and think can be dedicated to Him. The most basic aspects of life can be moments of grand worship, and our daily occupation is redirected from the basics of feeding our bodies into the eternal purpose of touching lives with the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Our Lord came to bring God’s redemption into the present day lives of all of humanity. Our part in this is not easy, but it is the work that God has called each of His people to do, and as we surrender ourselves to Christ’s will and engage with our days in the power of His Spirit, the ages old futility of our labors is transformed into the glorious produce that comes about because of Christ’s victory.